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Research In Motion is reporting that some customers using its BlackBerry smartphones in North America are experiencing problems with their e-mail service, according to a Dec. 17 report from Bloomberg.
The problem doesn’t extend to phone or Web-browsing capabilities, and the outage is reportedly not specific to a carrier but is affecting all customers using RIM’s browser-based e-mail service, versus a corporate server, Jeffrey Nelson, a spokesman for Verizon Wireless, told Bloomberg.
Technicians are reportedly hurrying to fix the problem.
“RIM has isolated and resolved the issue that was impacting some BlackBerry customers earlier this morning,” RIM told eWEEK in a statement, just before 1 p.m. “Some customers may still experience delays as e-mail queues are processed. RIM is continuing to investigate the cause of the issue and apologizes for any inconvenience.”
RIM suffered outages in April 2007 and February 2008, after which RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie told eWEEK, “It shouldn’t have happened, and it won’t happen again. It wasn’t a corruption of any form of the infrastructure, and that’s very important. It shouldn’t have happened, and it won’t happen again.”
That outage was said to be due to a service upgrade.
BlackBerry devices have been called the “gold standard” for enterprise-secure mobile e-mailing, though according to RIM, its users are now equally divided between enterprise and consumer users.
Earlier this month, consumer-poller BrandIndex showed consumer satisfaction levels with the BlackBerry brand to be on the rise.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This story has been updated to include a statement from RIM.
