Disruptions to Research in Motion Ltd.'s BlackBerry service continued around the world for a third-consecutive day, with problems spreading Wednesday into the company's giant North American and Asian markets.
BCE Inc.'s Bell Canada, one of the country's largest carriers, confirmed some of its BlackBerry customers were experiencing problems, and that RIM had told the carrier it expects service to be back up later in the morning.
Customers in the U.S. have also experienced problems, reporting missed emails overnight and flurries of email deliveries in the morning. BlackBerry messenger and Internet browsing weren't working for many subscribers.
RIM acknowledged North American outages, but didn't provide details.
"BlackBerry subscribers in the Americas may be experiencing intermittent service delays this morning," RIM said in a statement. " We are working to resolve the situation as quickly as possible and we apologize to our customers for any inconvenience. We will provide a further update as soon as more information is available."
Representatives of some of the big U.S. carriers weren't immediately available for comment.
Late Tuesday, RIM, based in Waterloo, Ontario, blamed disruptions that had plagued users in Europe, the Mideast, India, Latin America and Africa on a failed switch and backup. The company said the problem had been fixed, but that it could take some time to work through a "backlog" of data that the company's network hadn't been able to ship to users.
It's unclear if Wednesday's fresh problems were caused by this backlog. Apart from North America, disruptions were reported in previously unaffected regions, including Japan and Singapore.
As the reputational damage to BlackBerry's reliability spread, some carriers on Wednesday began offering customers compensation, raising the possibility that those carriers may look to RIM to compensate them in return. Meanwhile, the growing outage has become a big black eye for RIM, already rocked by a series of problems.
The company has seen its share price plummet this year—down about 60% since January—as competitors Apple Inc. and Google Inc.'s Android operating system snap up smartphone market share in North America and beyond.
Co-chief executives Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis are under pressure from shareholders to turn around flagging BlackBerry shipments. The company's recent PlayBook tablet has disappointed, and several product launches this year have been pushed back.
Through it all, RIM has said that its overseas markets were still thriving and customer loyalty remained strong around the world because of the BlackBerry system's security and reliability. This week's outages have triggered a raft of customer complaints in some of RIM's most important markets—including the U.K., Latin America and now Asia—and could drive key corporate customers to consider alternatives to BlackBerry services. European customers are suffering through their third day of outages.
All week, RIM executives have been tightlipped, frustrating customers and carrier executives. Despite widespread North American outages early Wednesday, RIM hadn't updated users about problems or issued any press statements as of midmorning Wednesday.
The United Arab Emirates' two telecoms operators—Emirates Telecommunications Corp. and Emirates Integrated Telecommunications Co.—said Wednesday they would compensate their BlackBerry customers for service interruptions across Europe and other parts of the world, including in the Middle East, in recent days.
"In light of the recent degradation that millions of BlackBerry users in the U.A.E. and many parts of the world have experienced over the past few days, which was out of our control, we have decided to compensate our customers," Emirates Integrated Telecommunications, better known as Du, said in an emailed statement.
Du said it would offer three days of free service to existing BlackBerry subscribers.
In a separate statement, Emirates Telecommunications Corp., or Etisalat, said "our partner RIM [Research In Motion] is working on resolving the issue currently impacting users. Keeping our customers satisfied is a priority for us and given the exceptional and unprecedented circumstances, we are compensating our BlackBerry users to demonstrate our care for their loyal and ongoing custom."
The two carriers didn't say whether they would seek compensation from RIM.
A RIM spokeswoman said Tuesday afternoon that the service disruptions "were caused by a core switch failure within RIM's infrastructure" and that a back-up switch operation "did not function as previously tested."
RIM said "as a result, a large backlog of data was generated and we are now working to clear that backlog and restore normal service as quickly as possible."
Meanwhile, subscribers in Europe reported intermittent problems with emails, messaging and browsing on their BlackBerry handsets with further problems being reported across Asian markets including Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore and India.
"Every one of our users is affected in some degree, some more than others," a spokesman for Vodafone Qatar Q.S.C. said. Some customers were having trouble sending emails and instant messages, the spokesman added.
BlackBerry users across Europe, including the U.K., France, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden faced problems when receiving email, surfing the Internet or using the BlackBerry Messenger service on their devices.
Users were experiencing disruption in services and delays of up to several hours though there were no total blackouts across Europe.
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