If you were cursing your BlackBerry last night, take some solace from the fact you weren’t the only one. Research in Motion, owner of BlackBerry, suffered an outage to its instant messenger, email and browsing services, cutting off customers. But stay calm, it was nothing to do with riots.
Customers took to Twitter to voice their complaints, as you would. The company soon admitted there was a problem via its Twitter feed.
“Some Canada & LatAm customers report BBM issue,” the tweet read. “Our support teams are investigating. We apologize [sic] for any inconvenience.”
The Huffington Post reported it had seen messages from UK users complaining of an interruption to the BBM service, while a BlackBerry site said some were experiencing problems with the whole BIS (BlackBerry Internet Service), affecting BBM, email, and even web browsing. Imagine that, it’d render your phone practically useless. Except for phone calls. But really, who bothers with them any more?
One user tweeted: “I’m in New York, can’t BBM US/Canada, but can Europe/Australia. Update us please — it’s killing me!”
UK users let their feelings known in forums. “Yep, it’s definitely not working since 7pm UK time,” one wrote. “The service has been very temperamental over the last six months… Come on RIM! Get your popular service back on track and reliable as it always use [sic] to be!”
BlackBerry’s BBM instant messenger service was in the news last month as it was named the tool of choice for UK rioters looking to communicate with others. There was even talk of pulling the plug on it and other social networks in times of crisis.
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