Massive BlackBerry Outage Strikes Again

BlackBerry addicts faced their second big outage in a year yesterday afternoon, when Research in Motion's wireless service went dark for three hours, from about 12:30 to 3:30 PM PST, angering millions.

RIM says no messages were lost during the outage, only delayed. 

The outage was not nearly as severe as the one that occurred in April last year and which spanned more than 12 hours of downtime. April's outage was ultimately traced to a buggy software patch applied to RIM's server software. RIM has not determined or announced the cause for yesterday's downtime but says it has "a team addressing this issue in order to define the problem and prevent it in the future."

But while yesterday's downtime may have lasted only three hours, it may have distressed consumers far more than the 2007 outage because it occurred in the middle of the workday. In contrast, the 2007 outage took place largely overnight. As one user, quoted by the AP, said tellingly, "I don't know what happened, I don't care what happened. They need to save their excuses for someone who cares."

Ouch.

Service should be running smoothly this morning. BlackBerry users should need to do nothing to restore normal operation, but if anything seems off, turning off the radio, waiting a few seconds, then turning it back on is always a good way to kickstart your device into sending and receiving again.