BlackBerry outage explained

Over the years, the name "BlackBerry" has become synonymous with mobile email. If this past year offers any indication, however, the BlackBerry name could soon become synonymous with something less positive: outages. This past Monday, North American BlackBerry customers experienced an email blackout, less than a year after a similar blackout occurred in April 2007. Even more disconcerting: RIM has now revealed that the outage was caused by a system upgrade at RIM's Canadian network operations center--which, as you may recall, was the cause of the April outage as well. Hopefully RIM will make a serious effort to sort out issues in the system upgrade process following this second outage. Given the pace at which BlackBerrys are selling, more system upgrades are an inevitability--let's just hope that more outages aren't as well.

For more on the outage:
- see this story from the AFP