Day 4 of BlackBerry issues. We’re letting you down, says RIM executive

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It is day 4 and the BlackBerry issues are not over for some customers.  In fact, as the day ended yesterday, reports started coming out that the outage was spreading to the US. For its part, Research in Motion explained at a press conference that the actual initial problems had been fixed, but a message backlog had to be dealt with.

“It is a backlog issue,” David Yach, RIM software vice president said yesterday from Canada, where the company is headquartered. “As you can imagine, with the global reach of Blackberry and people using it to contact others around the world, there’s a lot of messages to Europe from Asia and the Americas,” he explained.

In an update statement on the company’s website, RIM Chief Information Officer Robin Bienfait apologized:

You’ve depended on us for reliable, real-time communications, and right now we’re letting you down. We are taking this very seriously and have people around the world working around the clock to address this situation. We believe we understand why this happened and we are working to restore normal service levels in all markets as quickly as we can.

He further explained in the statement that for Africa (Europe, Middle East and India), BBM traffic should be online and traffic passing successfully but Internet browsing is temporarily unavailable.

Meanwhile, the backlash from angry BlackBerry users continues on Twitter, Facebook and other social networks. The phrase “Dear Blackberry” for example is trending on Twitter; users using it to express themselves on the situation.

Zimbabwe doesn’t have BlackBerry services yet, and possibilities of such prolonged outage may affect the service’s uptake when it does become available. But in other African markets, BlackBerry uptake has really been about low data rates. Maybe the question is will BlackBerry’s cheap internet and messaging drive the decision at the end of the day?

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4 comments

  1. JamesM

    Blackberry as we know is in decline, being hammered by Android and iPhone. This could not have come at the worst possible time. It’s fair to say “Bye-bye Blackberry it’s been nice knowing ya!”. Whether Blackberrry ever recovers from this spectacular hiccup remains to be seen. I for one doubt it. It’s fate is pretty much sealed. The CEO of Blackberry should know better than offer daft apologies. Customers vote with their wallets, either you offer them the service they expect or they go elsewhere. Apologies don’t change that!

  2. Tafmak3000

    I just got a message from my operator informing me that BIS is back online but they are just clearing message backlogs.

  3. KuraiMGT

    Someone will get fired. But I wont haste to say the jury is out on BB. At least they offer a service no other offers. Word has it that Voda (SA) and MTN are considering flat rate on data like on BB. It was an inconvenience (the outage) ….but it is a good service that is Africa friendly (in the face of data pricing robbery by ISPs). I hate their phones but the BBM is lekker

  4. Ribe

    To all my Blackberry messenger users please feel free to Download Ribe http://www.ribe.co.zw you can chat to your Ribe, Facebook, Googletalk, MSN, Yahoo contacts and you can tweet.

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