Massive BlackBerry outage

Seems to be covering North America. From our IDG News Service story:

Callers to the BlackBerry U.S. technical support line were still greeted with the following message early Wednesday morning: "We are currently experiencing a service interruption that is causing delays in sending or receiving messages. We apologize for the inconvenience and will provide updates as soon as they become available."

(Update 8, 10:25 a.m.: RIM says service restored for "most" users.)

(Update 9, 10:35: Just received this statement from RIM: "A service interruption occurred Tuesday night that affected BlackBerry in North America. Email delivery was delayed or intermittent during the service interruption. Phone service on BlackBerry handsets was unaffected. Root cause is currently under review, but service for most customers was restored overnight and RIM is closely monitoring systems in order to maintain normal service levels.")

This seems to have brought on the nightmare scenario that RIM dodged last year.

If the outage is causing you or someone you know grief this morning, please let me know in the comments section or via buzz@nww.com.

(Update, 8:15: Research in Motion stock trading lower, according to this report. With this one putting the loss at "more than 2 percent.)

(Update 2: This blogger sees a potential silver lining.)

(Update 3: An unconfirmed report that the system is "kinda up.")

(Update 4: Maybe not the best time for RIM to be introducing a new model.)

(Update 5: Recent MIT research shows - as you might expect - that this outage is no trivial matter to many users.)

(Update 6: Telecom analyst Jeff Kagan says in a statement: "We don't yet know what to blame the RIM Blackberry meltdown on. With that said, one thing seems clear. The rapid subscriber growth, plus the runaway junk email boom, equals a disaster in the making. Networks work fine until they reach their capacity, then all sorts of strange things happen.")(Update 7: They're talking about the outage over at Slashdot ... and let's just say sympathy is by no means the universal reaction.)Another report of progress being made.)

(Update 7: From Frank James of the Chicago Tribune's Washington bureau: "If Al Qaeda wanted to bring this city to its knees, it could not have come up with a better stratagem.")

(Update 10, 1 p.m.: Analyst takes a stab at "what went wrong.")

(Update 11: Rafael Paz, a loss control specialist for a car rental agency, writes that he's been "getting my e-mails about 1-4 hrs late minimum since yesterday." And it isn't just loss control that's suffering, Paz notes: "This issue sucks. I’ve been getting grief about it from my now ex-girlfriend thanks to this delay. She thought I was ignoring her e-mails when I was receiving them hours late." ... His full story here.)  

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