NEW YORK — BlackBerry users across the world were exasperated Wednesday as an outage of e-mail, messaging and Internet services on the phones spread to the U.S. and Canada and stretched into the third day for Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa.
It was the biggest outage in years for BlackBerry users and strained their relationship with a tarnished brand. It came on the eve of the launch of a mighty competitor — a new iPhone model.
Research in Motion Ltd., the Canadian company that makes the phones, said a crucial link in its European infrastructure failed Monday, and a backup didn’t work either. The underlying problem has been fixed, but a backlog of e-mails and messages has built up that the company has yet to work down.
Meanwhile, e-mails and messages from other regions to Europe were piling up in RIM’s systems in the rest of the world, such as letters clogging a mailbox. That caused the outages in the U.S. and Asia, said David Yach, RIM’s chief technology officer for software.
The outage hit those in Colorado. One user said e-mail was out for about six hours. Even after BlackBerry got back online, one user said his Outlook mailbox on his desktop computer didn’t sync properly with his BlackBerry.
At Zenprise Inc., a Fremont, Calif., firm that helps companies manage BlackBerrys issued to employees, vice president Ahmed Datoo said e-mails started piling up on U.S. servers shortly after midnight. By morning, the congestion was heavy enough at a particular client company to delay all e-mail for BlackBerrys. The pileup started to ease in the afternoon.
RIM is already struggling with delays in getting new phones out, with a tablet that has been a dud and with shares nearing a five-year low.
