BlackBerry outage strikes again

If you're a BlackBerry customer, you might be used to the occasional service outages by now, though that doesn't make them any less annoying. As you may have noticed, BlackBerry service experienced an outage lasting about three hours yesterday, preventing all of RIM's North American customers from checking their email and accessing other data that passes through the company's Canadian network operations center. This marks the second such outage during the past year, raising questions about RIM's ability to maintain a high level of reliability for its service in the face of a quickly growing userbase. The company has yet to provide an explanation for the outage, stating only that "RIM is continuing to investigate the exact cause and we will provide [users] with additional information as soon as we are able to verify the events that prompted the interruption." According to RIM, the last service outage, which took place in April 2007, was caused by a lack of testing.

For more on the latest outage:
- see this PC World article