BlackBerry has reported issues with their clients in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and India. Unfortunately, glitches in the browsing capabilities, the BlackBerry Messenger and email have spread to North America.
“Although the system is designed to failover to a back-up switch, the failover did not function as previously tested,” said the company {link no longer active}. “ As a result, a large backlog of data was generated, and we are now working to clear that backlog and restore normal service as quickly as possible.”
Thousands of unhappy RIM customers have posted messages on the BlackBerry Facebook page {page no longer active} to complain. While some customers are venting, others are posting very real threats of switching over to Apple, which just announced the release of its own iMessage app to directly compete with BBM.
Reports are that this is the worst BlackBerry service disruption in two years. It comes from the issue of the centralized BlackBerry servers used around the world; while this makes it easier to encrypt data for security purposes, if a server goes down, it can knock out regions of the world and affect millions of customers.
Source: AdWeek