BlackBerry subscribers throughout the world continued to experience disruptions in service for a third consecutive day as problems with Research In Motion's equipment in its data centers appears to now be affecting North American subscribers as well.
Customers using Research In Motion's BlackBerry smartphones in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa experienced an email, messaging and Web surfing outage on Monday. The problems continued Tuesday with only spotty access to email, BlackBerry Messenger, and Web. At first the problems only affected subscribers mainly in Europe, the Middle East, India and Africa.
But the issues spread to other parts of the world including parts of South America. And on Wednesday morning customers in the U.S. and Canada also began complaining of emails being delayed and sent in batches. One user in the Boston area said he began seeing email delays early Wednesday morning. And when batches of email arrived, they were about three hours old.
Earlier RIM blamed the disruption to service that affected Europe, the Mideast, India, Latin America and Africa on a failed switch and backup. The company said the problem had been fixed. But it also added that it might take some time to work through the backlog of data, which had not yet been sent to subscribers' devices. Email started to trickle in for some users late Tuesday.
"Although the system is designed to failover to a back-up switch, the failover did not function as previously tested," the company explained in a statement on Tuesday. "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. We apologize for any inconvenience and we will continue to keep you informed."
It's not yet clear clear whether the issues plaguing customers overseas is what is also affecting service in North America. A RIM representative was not available for comment regarding disruptions in the North America.
BlackBerry users in Canada and parts of Central and South America also suffered service disruption last month, when RIM's e-mail and messenger services were down.
RIM's BlackBerry network architecture is its strength as well as its biggest weakness. Unlike other smartphone platforms, RIM routes all e-mail and messaging traffic through its BlackBerry servers in network operation centers throughout the world. This centralized architecture for the service means that additional encryption and security can be added to the messages that traverse the network. And for many corporate customers, this added security is the main reason they use the service.
But the architecture also means there are single points of failure throughout the network. This means that when there is a major infrastructure disruption, it can affect entire regions of service, potentially knocking out service for tens of millions of customers. By contrast competing smartphones, such as the iPhone and Google Android devices, do not suffer from the same outages because there is no single point of failure in the network.
Customers using Research In Motion's BlackBerry smartphones in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa experienced an email, messaging and Web surfing outage on Monday. The problems continued Tuesday with only spotty access to email, BlackBerry Messenger, and Web. At first the problems only affected subscribers mainly in Europe, the Middle East, India and Africa.
But the issues spread to other parts of the world including parts of South America. And on Wednesday morning customers in the U.S. and Canada also began complaining of emails being delayed and sent in batches. One user in the Boston area said he began seeing email delays early Wednesday morning. And when batches of email arrived, they were about three hours old.
Earlier RIM blamed the disruption to service that affected Europe, the Mideast, India, Latin America and Africa on a failed switch and backup. The company said the problem had been fixed. But it also added that it might take some time to work through the backlog of data, which had not yet been sent to subscribers' devices. Email started to trickle in for some users late Tuesday.
"Although the system is designed to failover to a back-up switch, the failover did not function as previously tested," the company explained in a statement on Tuesday. "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. We apologize for any inconvenience and we will continue to keep you informed."
It's not yet clear clear whether the issues plaguing customers overseas is what is also affecting service in North America. A RIM representative was not available for comment regarding disruptions in the North America.
BlackBerry users in Canada and parts of Central and South America also suffered service disruption last month, when RIM's e-mail and messenger services were down.
RIM's BlackBerry network architecture is its strength as well as its biggest weakness. Unlike other smartphone platforms, RIM routes all e-mail and messaging traffic through its BlackBerry servers in network operation centers throughout the world. This centralized architecture for the service means that additional encryption and security can be added to the messages that traverse the network. And for many corporate customers, this added security is the main reason they use the service.
But the architecture also means there are single points of failure throughout the network. This means that when there is a major infrastructure disruption, it can affect entire regions of service, potentially knocking out service for tens of millions of customers. By contrast competing smartphones, such as the iPhone and Google Android devices, do not suffer from the same outages because there is no single point of failure in the network.