Users get BlackBerry blues, corporate productivity hit

Corporate users of BlackBerry smartphones had to deal with disrupted services for the third consecutive day on Wednesday.

Financial institutions, banks and other companies, which use enterprise email services by BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion, were affected.

RIM struggled to resolve the disruption of services to have affected tens of millions of users in India, Europe, West Asia and Africa.

It has more than 70 million subscribers worldwide.

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In India, RIM commands a user base of more than a million, nearly 60 per cent of it enterprise users.

According to Cyber Media Research, it grabbed 13 per cent share of India's smartphone market in 2010, from eight per cent in 2009. 

Users were unable to access services such as BlackBerry Messenger, Internet apps and emails on their BlackBerry handsets on Wednesday.

A fund manager from HSBC said, "Since we cannot access official emails, it has become necessary that we lug our laptops to access all official data at meetings. It is getting really tiresome."

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A leading Mumbai-based private wealth management firm, which has offices across Asia, Europe and West Asia, had switched to a BlackBerry Enterprise Server three years back.

It reported loss of productivity due to the BlackBerry outage.

A senior asset manager said, "Since many of our colleagues work in different time zones, we synchronise our work over emails and hourly or daily reports.

"A BlackBerry thus comes in handy to access mails on the go and respond to urgent client requests."

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With business emails delayed for BES clients, many companies have allowed employees to carry work laptops and official data cards home to access critical business data.

Often derided as CrackBerry or JackBerry for its users' maniacal obsession with the device, something that has reportedly wrecked many personal relationships, for a change it was time for the smartphone's addictive users to let out some ire on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

Sudhindra Rao, a BlackBerry user in Hyderabad, tweeted, "It is nice of BlackBerry to honour Steve Jobs with two days of silence."

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Some others like Pranita Kocharekar wrote, "If BlackBerry services don't resume within the next one hour, I'm switching over to the iPhone."

Veteran actor and BlackBerry user Amitabh Bachchan tweeted, "Blackberry. . . What does one do to get you up again? Stifled frustrated and just so."

A BlackBerry user Tarun Bhalla wrote on BlackBerry India's official Facebook page, "Will I be compensated for this failure in service?

Three successive days of service failure should be adjusted in the BlackBerry data bill for the month."

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Incidentally, while RIM struggles to get its services on track, rival company Apple is preparing to put on sale its iPhone 4S in the US markets on Friday.

The BlackBerry outage began on Monday morning and lasted until late in the afternoon. RIM indicated the problem was fixed, but on Tuesday morning users discovered they had once again lost service, with limited access to emails, web browsing and secure services such as BBM. 

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According to RIM's official statement, messaging and browsing delays were experienced by BlackBerry users in Europe, West Asia, Africa, India, Brazil, Chile and Argentina and were caused by a core switch failure within RIM's infrastructure.

"A large backlog of data was generated, and we are now working to clear that backlog and restore normal service as quickly as possible. We apologise for any inconvenience, and we will continue to keep you informed," the statement said.