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Canada's Research in Motion (RIM) apologized Wednesday to users of its popular Blackberry smartphone in the Americas after they were hit by an outage in email service overnight, the second in less than a week for some customers.
RIM said in a statement that the email service interruption late Tuesday appears to have been caused by a flaw in two recently released versions of Blackberry Messenger.
"Message delivery was delayed or intermittent during the service interruption," the Waterloo, Ontario-based company said, although "phone service and SMS services on BlackBerry smartphones were unaffected."
"RIM has taken corrective action to restore service," it said. "RIM continues to monitor its systems to maintain normal service levels and apologizes for any inconvenience to customers."
RIM did not say how many Blackberry users were affected by the outage, which came six days after technical problems affected delivery of emails to some users in North America.
The company also suffered Blackberry outages in 2007 and 2008 and the latest disruptions come as RIM faces stepped up competition in the smartphone market from Apple's iPhone, Motorola's Droid and other devices.
Blackberry's problems were one of the top 10 "trending topics" on Twitter on Wednesday as users took to the micro-blogging service to air their complaints.
Telecom analyst Jeff Kagan said he did not expect the "black eye" for Blackberry to have too much immediate negative impact.
"I don't see customers canceling service yet, but if outages continue that may start to happen," he said.
"RIM has a special relationship with their customers," Kagan said. "It's like Apple has with consumers, but this is for business customers.
"However even the best of relationships cannot withstand outage after outage after outage," he said. "If these outages continue we can expect to see the first wave of customers cancel."
"I don't think these outages mean RIM will lose long term. Worse case scenario they will get a black eye or two, self inflicted, and they may lose a few accounts, but long term this is still a strong and growing company.
"Assuming the problems don't continue."
RIM blamed the latest disruption on "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."
The company encouraged users who downloaded or upgraded BlackBerry Messenger since December 14 to upgrade to the latest version.
RIM's service disruption last week came on the same day that it reported quarterly earnings that surpassed the expectations of Wall Street analysts.
RIM reported a 58.5 percent rise in quarterly net profit to 628.4 million dollars. Revenue rose 41 percent to 3.92 billion dollars.
The company also announced that it shipped a record 10.1 million devices during the quarter which ended on November 28, including its 75 millionth Blackberry.
RIM said it added a net 4.4 million new BlackBerry subscriber accounts in the quarter giving it a total BlackBerry account base of 36 million.
RIM shares were trading 0.03 percent higher at 67.24 dollars in New York at mid-day on Wednesday.
