BlackBerry Glitch Having Caused Chaos around The World

KOMPAS.com - BlackBerry teams laboured round the clock to fix the faults engulfing the company's email, instant messaging and web services, as users across the U.S. reported service failures for the first time.

The failures still appear to be traceable to a single incident in Slough in the UK. Updates from the company are few and far between: the last communication from BlackBerry was 420PM BST.

It appears that the problems - which are no longer restricted entirely to consumer users - may be knock-on issues caused by the huge backlog of emails that the company has failed to deliver over the past three days. Analysts now estimate that up to half of BlackBerry's 70 million users may be affected.

'Dear BlackBerry' has become a trending topic on Twitter. Canadian merchant bank Jaguar Financial Corp said holders of at least 8 percent of Research in Motion's stock are behind its campaign for a shake-up of the company.

Sir Alan Sugar tweeted, '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.'

Former political spin doctor Alastair Campbell said, 'Some free advice. Explain while you fix. Apologise when you have. Recompense after.'

BlackBerry's UK managing director Stephen Bates said, 'We thought we had found the problem, but we had not. We are working around the clock to get to the bottom of it.'

BlackBerry has not explained why back-up systems have failed to solve the fault. A BlackBerry spokesperson refused to confirm to Mail Online how many users were affected, or even which countries were affected by today's ongoing glitch.

This came after parent company RIM claimed that yesterday's 10-hour glitch had been fixed. It's a serious embarrassment for the company, which has 70million users worldwide - and appeared to be traceable to the same data centre in Slough where yesterday's problems originated.

Twitter was filled with users cursing BlackBerry and jokes at the company's expense - 'What did one BlackBerry user say to the other BlackBerry user? Nothing.'

The company has also been criticised for its failure to communicate during the crisis. Matt Bath, Which Magazine's technology editor said, 'BlackBerry should be doing more to keep customers informed about the ongoing problems with its service.'

'In some cases, customers have heard about the issue from their mobile network provider but have heard nothing from BlackBerry itself. That's not great customer service.'

Ordinary users were simply furious - one Tweeter said, 'It's ridiculous! SORT IT OUT!' and many talked of switching handset: 'What is wrong with Blackberry? Systems freeze too often. I'm getting closer to an iPhone.'

On Tuesday, UK operator T-Mobile UK blamed 'a European-wide outage on the BlackBerry network' which it said was affecting all mobile operators. There were also reports of problems across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Etisalat, which operates in the United Arab Emirates, apologized for 'the further interruption' to Blackberry services, 'once again due to RIM problems.' There were no reports of any problems in the U.S.

The problem which started on Monday saw millions of customers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa unable to send instant messages or access the internet.

A RIM spokesman said: 'We're investigating, and we apologise to our customers for any inconvenience caused whilst this is resolved.'

RIM recently appeared before the Home Affairs Select Committee following the riots which took place in England in August. Much of the disorder was reportedly organised using its BlackBerry Messenger service.

Users were still able to access the internet on a WiFi network but email and the instant messaging service were cut off all together.

It's a major embarrassment for the company, which prides itself on routing email and messages securely and privately through its servers.