BlackBerry Network Fails

April 18^th 2007 – Millions of BlackBerry addicts through the US are suffering from withdrawal symptoms; the email service run by the company for their popular handsets suffered a failure overnight that left users in email limbo.

The outage began at around 5:15pm Pacific time on the 17th and was still causing issues on the morning of the 18^th. Research In Motion (RIM) did not clarify where the failure occurred, but the speculation amongst observers is that one of the NOCs (Network Operating Centers) in Canada through which all emails are sent from and to devices  suffered a major failure. When we tested a device on the Cingular network on Wednesday morning, we had no issues sending emails, but incoming emails to our test device were not delivered.  We were able to browse the Web, but the service did seem slower than usual. Many users on sites such as HowardForums were reporting problems with web browsing.  When we checked with Cingular tech support at 11am EST, they claimed that most of the issues were resolved, and that the network was nearly restored.

The outage seemed to be restricted to the US, though. Infoworld reported that BlackBerry networks in Europe and Asia were not having the same problems as North America.

UPDATE: Several news sources are reporting that the service has been restored, but there's no offical word from RIM yet. On our test device, emails are still not being received. The Wall Street Journal reports that the service was restored at 6AM EST, but that it was going to take some time for the backlog of email to be processed. They quoted Mark Siegel of Cingular as saying "It's obviously going to take some time to clear out the accumulated backlog of message traffic...I don't know how long that will take."