Blackberry users in Canada and Asia Pacific experienced a major service outage early Tuesday.
While the exact cause of the outage is not known, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) quoted a company spokesperson as saying, "We can confirm that a service issue is impacting some users in Canada and the Asia Pacific region,"
"Our technical team has identified the potential cause of the issue and has reduced its impact on customers' service. The team will continue to work towards a full resolution as quickly as possible. We apologize to any customers who may be affected by this issue." Mobilesyrup later identified the representative as Lisette Kwong.
According to IT World Canada, users with handsets running operating systems older than BlackBerry 10 experienced trouble in sending and receiving mail largely in British Columbia, Manitoba, Nova Scotia, News Brunswick, Quebec and Ontario.
Blackberry users first reported the problem on Canadian Outages website. BB10 devices were not affected as they are not entirely reliant on Blackberry networks, it said.
"Issues with BBM, text and email. Messages not being delivered. BlackBerry curve," said user Victoria Pickering-Labadie. Another user, Darlene Hyde from Vancouver, said "I cannot send or receive messages/emails on my BB." Users also said Ping messaging service was affected.
At the time of reporting, more than 50 users had posted problems. Canadian Outages also reported that most users were facing problems with sending or receiving messages while the rest reported issues with the Blackberry messenger.
Reporting on Tuesday's outage, WSJ also mentioned that it was the first such interruption since the company came under its new management. Blackberry had its worst ever outage in 2011 that lasted three days. Small outages were reported in Europe and Middle East.
Additional reporting from The Globle and Mail suggested that the outage couldn't have come at a more inappropriate for Blackberry, since it's facing a stiff competition from Android and iPhone.
