BlackBerry restored, outage noted as “critical”

The major outage that hit BlackBerry users in North America is now fixed and is being described as a “critical severity outage” that affected users in the Americas. During the outage, RIM support account manager Bryan Simpson said in an e-mail to the company’s large clients Blackberry users “This is an emergency notification regarding the current BlackBerry Infrastructure outage and affected business clients and users of the Americas network.”

In a released statement RIM said that data services in the Americas experienced delays on around 3.30 p.m, but were fully restored restored around 7:00 p.m.. The statement went on to say “A massive e-mail blackout that hit BlackBerry users Monday afternoon was caused by an internal data routing system and system upgrade. The upgrade was part of RIM’s routine and ongoing efforts to increase overall capacity for longer term growth.”

This has raised concerns in the marketplace about the stability of the e-mail service and network as only 10 months ago in April 2007 a similar widespread ourtage occured. However, RIM’s shares finished the day C$4.73 higher at C$94.62.