Blackberry Goes Black

You could see them roving about aimlessly yesterday: the crackberry addicts whose supply chain went, unceremoniously, dark.

This from eWeek:

RIM has no comment as a "critical severity" outage sweeps through the United States. BlackBerry users were without service Feb. 11 as a widespread outage hit the users of Research in Motion's popular smart phone. The cause of the outage is still unknown, as is how long it will continue.

According to the Associated Press, AT&T claims the outage has hit all U.S. wireless carriers and that the problem originates at RIM (Research in Motion). AT&T said the first outage begin at approximately 3:30 p.m.

RIM did not immediately respond to a request for comment, nor did its Web site have any mention of the outage as of 6 p.m., EDT.

Reuters reported that Bryan Simpson, RIM support account manager, sent an e-mail to BlackBerry users late in the afternoon about the "critical severity outage." Simpson said in the e-mail the outage was affecting all enterprise customers and "users of the Americas network. [...]

Wait! Their email system went down, so Simpson sent...an...e-mail rather than posting the information on their website? Clever.