Blackberry"s online services have been affected by outage problems across the world for three days. Now those issues are hitting users of Research in Motion"s smartphonse here in North America. Computerworld.com reports that US users have reported that Blackberry"s Messenger service was down. A news anchor for the CNBC TV network reported on air this morning that he has been unable to receive email on his Blackberry device for the past several hours.
The outages, which has also affect surfing the web on Blackberry"s web browser, started hitting customers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa on Monday. At that time RIM said that the issue was caused by a corrupt database in its Slough, UK location. The problem appeared to be fixed on Monday but outages occurred again for Blackberry customers on Tuesday in the same parts of the world, along with India and parts of South America. Late on Tuesday, RIM said that the problems were caused by a "core switch failure" in its online service and that it was attempting to fix the solution.
Once again these online issues with Blackberry phones are making some customers, especially businesses who have been using Blackberry devices for years, think about switching to other smartphones such as Apple"s iPhone and phones based on Google"s Android operating system. Well known entrepreneur Alan Sugar posted a Twitter message that said, "In all my years in IT biz, I have never seen such a outage as experienced by Blackberry. I can"t understand why it"s taking so long to fix."