Research in Motion Ltd's BlackBerry smartphone messaging service suffered widespread delays across North and South America, just a week after another outage struck the popular network. RIM said in a statement that message delivery was delayed or intermittent during the service interruption, though phone service on its popular devices was not affected.
It began on Tuesday and was resolved overnight. The failure came less than a week after a short-lived outage on December 17 - the same day the Canadian Company reported quarterly results. Still, analysts said that they doubt the outages will hurt near-term sales at the Canadian Company, which shipped a record-breaking 10 million smartphones in its most-recent quarter. Its chief competitor, Apple Inc's iPhone, is plagued by complaints of poor service on the U.S. network of AT&T Inc.
"I'm certain there are some pissed-off people. But in general the BlackBerry is the best email or communications service in the business market, so I don't see any kind of defections at this point," said Needham & Co analyst Charles Wolf.
The company's line of BlackBerry products is one of the world's most popular smartphone brands, and is used widely among corporations as an email and communications device. BlackBerry users on December 22 reported problems on the wireless networks of AT&T, Verizon Communications Inc, Sprint Nextel Corp and T-Mobile USA, a unit of Deutsche Telekom.
BlackBerry customers were also hit by email delays last week, though that outage appeared to affect mainly individual and small-business users, rather than large corporations.
The company said that it believed a programming flaw contained in a recent upgrade to its BlackBerry Messenger software had caused the disturbance. RIM runs messaging traffic through its own network of secure servers, which makes it vulnerable to outages that can simultaneously affect millions of users across multiple carriers. Rival smartphone makers Apple, Motorola Corp and Nokia do not manage the messaging traffic on their devices, so that means there is no risk of such outages.
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