BlackBerry maker Research in Motion Ltd experienced a significant outage of its BlackBerry wireless email service on Monday, its second nationwide disruption in the last 12 months.

The Waterloo, Ontario-based company notified its customers of the problem at around 3:20 Eastern time, saying that the outage was affecting about 50% of North America customers across wireless carriers.

RIM didn't return calls seeking comment.

In its notice to customers, RIM said the cause of the outage was "to be determined." It follows a similar outage last April, which was caused by an improperly tested software update at the company's data center that handles BlackBerry email traffic for millions of users.

Source: WSJ

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I was referring to the need for third party applications to actually close programs rather than minimize them when hitting the 'X' button.

Posted by Physboy, Tuesday, Feb. 12th, 2008

"That will happen right around the same time that MS stops trying to push off the responsibility of memory management on 3rd party developers."

And how do you know this? For example the .Net framework takes the responsibility of memory management out of the hands of the developer and places it in the framework. For non-.net applications, the application can request to release memory on a application exit/close but the actual release of the application resources is solely on the OS.

Posted by JNGold, Tuesday, Feb. 12th, 2008

"Now if only those pesky soft resets would go away ;-)"

That will happen right around the same time that MS stops trying to push off the responsibility of memory management on 3rd party developers.

Posted by Physboy, Tuesday, Feb. 12th, 2008

RIM has set the bar so high with its near-flawless email system that what could be considered minor issues are major stories. I continue to prefer the rock-solid email consistency of the BlackBerry (although I am currently using an iPhone, talk about email issues, but that is for another discussions) over the general lack of stability of many Windows Mobile powered devices. The device cannot pull mail in when it is frozen!

By the way, GT2697, I remember Jim Balsillie (RIM co-CEO and, at the time, Chairman) making the statement about "never again". The use of the word "never" struck me as ill-advised. It was probably what people wanted to hear in the wake of the March 2007 outage, but the use of words like "always" and "never" to describe activities with so many variables is simply not a solid idea.

Posted by Justia, Monday, Feb. 11th, 2008

Glad to hear that. I think this will get a lot of attention though. After the CEO stated last April that it wouldn't happen again.

Posted by gt2697, Monday, Feb. 11th, 2008

Agreed Mick but this outage was 45 minutes for me.. Didnt even notice it.

Posted by David Ciccone, Monday, Feb. 11th, 2008

I don't know anyone around here that were effected, but this is making the rock solid stability of the BB really get questioned. Don't get me wrong, they are still at a very good uptime, but if it isn't 100 percen, they are going to get rediculed. No problems with email on my Treo today by the way. Now if only those pesky soft resets would go away ;-)

Posted by gt2697, Monday, Feb. 11th, 2008