NEW YORK — A major service outage afflicted users of the popular, addictive BlackBerry smart phones across the United States and Canada on Monday.
Officials with AT&T and Verizon said BlackBerry maker Research in Motion told them customers of all wireless carriers were affected.
It was not immediately clear how many of the 12 million worldwide BlackBerry subscribers had problems, as some users reported being able to access their service normally Monday afternoon.
But Garth Turner, a member of the Canadian Parliament, said during a caucus meeting that the incident’s impact couldn’t be overestimated. “Everyone’s in crisis because they’re all picking away at their Blackberrys and nothing’s happening,” Turner said. “It’s almost like cutting the phone cables or a total collapse in telegraph lines a century ago.”
Bell Canada spokesman Jason Laszlo said the majority of its BlackBerry customers were affected. “There’s really no estimated time of repair,” Laszlo said.
In a statement, RIM said a “data service interruption” was resulting in “intermittent service delays for BlackBerry subscribers in North America.”
