BlackBerry users in North America are going cold turkey this morning as Research in Motion deals with a system failure on its BlackBerry network. Problems began at about 2000 EDT and continued through most of the night. The issue is either preventing or delaying email delivery but users can continue to make cellular calls without issue as those go through the carriers rather than RIM’s BlackBerry infrastructure.
The issues were apparently corrected early this morning but RIM is now dealing with a massive backlog of messages that need to be delivered. They are having to send messages in a controlled fashion to prevent overloading the system. There are reports that some users are also having trouble browsing the Internet.
RIM has not yet provided a root cause for the outage.