A North American World Without Email
A North American World Without Email
April 19, 2007: Blackberry services experienced a major outage this week, causing pain and panic for millions of BlackBerry email users across Canada and the US, while igniting sighs of relief in others.
For over ten hours from late Tuesday night, North American BlackBerry uses were left without email access after Research in Motion cut off its wireless email service. The problem was rectified at 6am Wednesday morning.
The online media is abuzz with horror stories of individuals facing a world without email. For some, they had to resort to SMS, for others they had to find a stationary PC or fire up the laptop to keep in touch. There are reports of individuals landing at domestic airports, switching on their BlackBerrys for the usual rush of emails sent during the flight, only to receive nothing.
For others, the disappointment at the service was quickly overshadowed by the freedom to finally be disconnected from email. “I took a deep breath and finally enjoyed the feeling akin to when I was recently in Central American and the BlackBerry didn’t work,” Barry Frey from Cablevision told the International Herald Tribune.
Following the outage, Research in Motion released a brief statement apologising for the outage and stating that the cause of the blackout was still under review.
After experiencing the darkness for over ten hours, many BlackBerry users received a barrage of emails once the service was restored. Backlogged email messages entered the devices simultaneously on Wednesday morning, ready for the new working day.