The BlackBerry service outage affecting Europe, Africa, and Asia has now spread to the U.S. and Canada. Customers affected by the malfunction are unable to send and receive email, use BlackBerry Messenger, and other data services.
RIM, the BlackBerry manufacturer, says a critical piece of equipment and a back-up system have both failed. “Although the system is designed to fail over to a backup switch, the failover did not function as previously tested,” the company wrote on the BlackBerry Facebook page.
These occurrences are not without precedent. Last month, BlackBerry Messenger service crashed for several hours in Canada and Latin America.
Of course, these troubles could not come at worse time – BlackBerry is continuing to lose market share to Androids and iPhones.
Read more at Mashable and at The New York Times.
