The widespread problems added to the woes of Research in Motion, the Canadian company that makes the phones. It is struggling with slowing sales and a tablet that has been a dud. Its shares were approaching a five-year low.
On Tuesday, RIM said a crucial link in its infrastructure had failed, and a backup didn’t work either. It said it was now working to get through a backlog of traffic.
“The resolution of this service issue is our Number One priority right now and we are working night and day to restore all BlackBerry services to normal levels,” the company said Wednesday.
Unlike other cellphone makers, RIM servers handle e-mail and messaging traffic to and from its phones. When the company encounters a problem, millions of subscribers can be affected at once. There are about 70 million BlackBerry users around the world.
BlackBerrys first caught on among professionals in the United States and Canada, but in recent years, growth has been driven entirely by overseas markets. In RIM’s most recent quarter, two-thirds of BlackBerrys were sold to people outside North America.
One of the big attractions of the BlackBerry for overseas users is BlackBerry Messenger, or BBM, which works like text messaging but doesn’t incur extra fees. That service was affected by the outage.
Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=5a28dcbdc28bcd2a1e5f27aaf0df15a2
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