BlackBerry outage

Research In Motion Ltd. remained silent on Thursday regarding the cause of a massive service outage of its BlackBerry e-mail service that frustrated thousands of users across North America and initially spooked investors.

Analysts were left to speculate about what could have triggered the crash, which left politicians, lawyers, business executives and other so-called "CrackBerry" addicts without wireless e-mail service on Tuesday night and into Wednesday.

"RIM won't tell us what caused the problem, although they do tell us they know what caused it. We were told to expect a technical explanation to come out shortly," TD Newcrest analyst Chris Umiastowski wrote in a note to clients.

"So long as RIM solves whatever went wrong and communicates it well enough to customers, we foresee no lasting impact."

He wrote that RIM's network operations center in Waterloo, Ontario, which covers North America, suffered "some sort of failure."

In the event of such a crash, Umiastowski wrote, another of RIM's network operations facilities in Britain was supposed to handle the full load of e-mail traffic, "but RIM confirmed that this feature did not work."

Late on Thursday, RIM said in an e-mailed statement that "the full root cause analysis will take more time," but added it expects to have an update ready by Thursday evening or Friday morning.

RIM has about 8 million subscribers that use its ubiquitous BlackBerry devices for everything from making phone calls and listening to music to organizing personal calendars. However, its key draw is its on-the-go wireless e-mail access.

RIM added more than 1 million new customer accounts in the last quarter alone and, in the three months ending June 2, it expects to add as many as 1.15 million more. At least one analyst has questioned whether RIM's infrastructure is strong enough to handle its torrid pace of growth.

RIM's volatile shares finished higher on Wednesday despite the outage and related bad publicity after first opening about 2 percent lower.

On Thursday, the stock fell $1.88 to close at $132.49 on Nasdaq. On the Toronto Stock Exchange, it declined C$1.92 to close at C$149.85.
($1=$1.13 Canadian)

source:www.canada.com