BlackBerry e-mail service restored for some North American users after 2nd outage in a week

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BlackBerry e-mail restored for some after outage

TORONTO — BlackBerry e-mail service in North America was restored for some users Wednesday morning following its second outage in less than a week.

Research In Motion Ltd. said Wednesday the root cause is still under review but its preliminary analysis has determined there was a flaw in two recently released versions of its BlackBerry Messenger instant messaging software.

RIM has also provided a new version of BlackBerry Messenger (version 5.0.0.57) and is encouraging anyone who downloaded or upgraded BlackBerry Messenger since Dec. 14 to upgrade to this latest version, which resolves the issue.

RIM said late Tuesday technicians were working to resolve e-mail messaging delays on its BlackBerry smart phones in North and South America.

But by Wednesday morning many BlackBerry users posting on the social networking site Twitter reported their BlackBerry service was back to normal.

RIM said message delivery was delayed or intermittent during the service interruption but said phone service and SMS service were unaffected. The Canadian company said it has taken corrective action to restore service.

During Tuesday’s outage, users in the Americas were unable to send or receive e-mail messages. Some said they also could not connect to the Internet.

Waterloo, Ontario-based Research in Motion in a statement apologized for any inconvenience experienced by customers.

BlackBerry service last went out last Thursday. At the time, Research In Motion said technicians had isolated and resolved the issue and were investigating the cause of the outages. The company didn’t say how many users were affected or how long that outage lasted.

The BlackBerry faces increasing competition from devices such as Apple’s iPhone, Palm’s Pre and the Motorola Droid. AT&T, in particular, has had had trouble keeping up with wireless data usage of the iPhone, which it carries exclusively in the U.S. Heavy data use by people watching videos and running powerful applications on their devices has led to dropped connections and long waits for users trying to run programs.