Blackberry Down

Last night I was unable to receive or send emails via my BlackBerry handheld. It turns out that there was a major outage which started Tuesday evening at about 8:00 p.m. eastern time and lasted through at least this morning. So far RIM (Research in Motion), the company that owns and provides the BlackBerry service has not offered an explanation as to what happened. It took RIM more than day to issue a statement, and even then they only said that the “root cause is currently under review.”

That left tech analysts and average BlackBerry users alike speculating about what exactly happened. Message boards were afire today with posters indicating how much they were adversly affected by the outage.

While non BlackBerry users might not quite understand the adoration for the handheld devices that leads to them being dubbed “CrackBerries,” a Internet poll taken Wednesday by telecom expense management firm ProfitLine Inc. found that almost 80% of respondents who work in IT and telecom related fields reported operations were disrupted by the outage, with about 45% saying that the effect was “moderate or substantial.”

Those findings show that “wireless communication has gone from a travel convenience to a mission critical tool,” Randall DeLorenzo, VP of ProfitLine, said in a statement about the web poll.

Although my BlackBerry is now working, it seems to be running much slower than before. Hopefully this will be temporary as devices sync up and services will return to normal. I am sure there will be more developments to this story, so stay tuned.

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