Blackberry users in the United States, Japan and Singapore have reportedsimilar difficulties getting online as their counterparts in Africa,LatinAmerica and Europe.RIM, which makes BlackBerry devices, released a statement sayingthat BlackBerry subscribers in the Americas may be experiencing intermittentservice delays this morning.The firm faced growing calls for compensation fromusers all over the world. European, Middle Eastern and African BlackBerry owners have now endured threeworking days without mobile internet access, including email and instantmessaging. RIM made no comment on the whether it would offer any money back asit battled to restore services. Users bombarded its Twitter accounts withdemands for compensation on Wednesday afternoon.
Etisalat, a mobile operator in the United Arab Emirates’, became the firstnetwork to announce its customers will be compensated. Both contract andpay-as-you-go customers in the Gulf state wil receive free service equivalentto three days' BlackBerry usage. Africa and Asia operators have made no commenton compensation, but it is understood they do not expect to offer any and blameRIM for the outage. After the service was briefly restored and then collapsedagain on Tuesday morning and RIM later said a broken switch in its coreinfrastructure was to blame for the renewed failure.
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| BlackBerry Bold 9860 |
The system is designed to failover to a back-up switch, the failover did notfunction as previously tested according to RIM. As a result, a large backlog ofdata was generated and we are now working to clear that backlog and restorenormal service as quickly as possible," it said. But by yesterday late inthe evening users were still cut off from the internet because my friend VilleMakinnen told me the problem is on.Bloggers and mainstream media have beencritical of RIM's communication strategy continued, with many condemning itspublic handling of the crisis.
The timing is particularly unfortunate for RIM in my opinion, as Apple launches the iPhone 4Sand competing internet services this week, including iMessage, a rival to BBM. Ifeel sorry for this lovely brand that set the pace for smartphone marketbecause they are in a jam and users are panning it. The biggest problem is thatno one at RIM seem to know the source of the problems and they are gettingthemselves into a right pickle. It seems that matters are coming to the boiland this is leaving a very bad taste in the mouth of the millions of middleclass customers to whom this service is their every daily bread and butter..
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