BlackBerry Outage Over – Caused By BlackBerry Messenger

The BlackBerry Outage from yesterday and today was a crazy lasting over 12 hours. It started with just PIN and BlackBerry Messenger out and then expanded to take out the whole BlackBerry network including BES enterprise emails and web browsing even over WiFi and WEP. The outage should be over for everybody but if you are still having issues pull the battery on your device to reboot it.

Audit over @DataOutages has scored a preliminary statement from RIM about the outage and it looks like both this outage and the one last week were caused by a flaw in BlackBerry Messenger versions 5.0.0.55 and 5.0.0.56. RIM is asking for everybody to upgrade to BlackBerry Messenger 5.0.0.57 at www.blackberry.com/messenger. MAKE SURE TO BACK UP your contacts before doing the update by going to Menu>Options>Backup>Locally to SD Card in BlackBerry Messenger.

RIM Statement – December 23rd – A service interruption occurred Tuesday that affected BlackBerry customers in the Americas. Message delivery was delayed or intermittent during the service interruption. Phone service and SMS services on BlackBerry smartphones were unaffected. Root cause is currently under review, but based on preliminary analysis, it currently appears that the issue stemmed from a flaw in two recently released versions of BlackBerry Messenger (versions 5.0.0.55 and 5.0.0.56) that caused an unanticipated database issue within the BlackBerry infrastructure.

RIM has taken corrective action to restore service. RIM has also provided a new version of BlackBerry Messenger (version 5.0.0.57) and is encouraging anyone who downloaded or upgraded BlackBerry Messenger since December 14th to upgrade to this latest version which resolves the issue. RIM continues to monitor its systems to maintain normal service levels and apologizes for any inconvenience to customers.