BlackBerry Outrage Spreads Worldwide as Complaints Pour Out in Twitter

BlackBerry outages spread all over the world on Wednesday, prompting people to think whether RIM is in its death throes already.

BlackBerry encountered an outage of e-mail, messaging and Internet services since Monday in India, Europe and the Middle East. On Wednesday, it spread to Canada and the U.S.

This has been the largest outage for BlackBerry in years, triggering great frustration among the BlackBerry users. Frustrated by the already tarnished brand, BlackBerry customers spouted off their plans of buying iPhones.

Many unhappy users complained on Twitter beginning with Dear BlackBerry.

A sampling in the last few minutes:

Dear Blackberry ... why do you insist on making my life harder.

Dear Blackberry, do you know what the iPhone said to the Blackberry? iWork

Dear Blackberry, (RIM) you need to step your game up before IPhone take all your users ThatIsAll

Dear Blackberry as soon as i get my #iPhone I'm GIVING you away. free-like.

Research In Motion Ltd., the Canadian company that makes BlackBerry, said an important link in its European infrastructure encountered a core switch failure on Monday, and a backup didn't work either. The underlying disruption has been fixed but a backlog of emails and messages has piled up the company's computers and the company will have to work down.

The service disruption came right after the release of the new iPhone 4S in North America which is its primary market. RIM had also been trying to increase sales overseas. This is a big blow because it undermines the core value proposition that RIM is built upon - the secure, reliable delivery of messages to your BlackBerry, Charles Golvin, a wireless analyst at Forrester Research Inc. said.

Facing increasing criticism, the company held a conference on Wednesday and apologized to its customers. It also said the company is taking this issue seriously and its staff around the world is working on a fix. We believe we understand why this happened and we are working to restore normal service levels in all markets as quickly as we can, the company's CIO said at the conference.

However the customers were not satisfied. The complaints still continued in Twitter.

Dear Blackberry, I think it's nice that you're honoring Steve Jobs' death with a 3 day silence, one of the most retwitted tweets read.