Blackberry goes down...again

What's going on with BlackBerry lately? RIM's system went down again on Wednesday, starting around 6am on the East Coast. It apparently got progressively worse during the day, too. The outage initially affected about half of all BlackBerry users in the Americas but ultimately, the entire system was wiped out.

The latest episode comes just a week after another outage that lasted for three hours, during which time users were unable to send or receive messages or access the Internet. In January, AT&T BlackBerry users experienced an outage, though it was the fault of AT&T's network, not RIM's. And as you may recall, a major outage in April 2007 left some BlackBerry users out in the cold for days. Are these outages making you reconsider what you and your employees are using to communicate? Do you have a backup device?

For more on the BlackBerry service problems:
- See this ComputerWorld article