NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- analysis in Motion is suffering on all fronts. Its sales are flagging, investors are agitating for a management shakeup, the stock is down nearly hour this year, and currently its BlackBerry service is down -- once more.
The BlackBerry service outage started on Monday in Europe, the center East and Africa. By Tuesday it unfold to South America. That night, RIM assured customers that the glitch had been identified and was "now being resolved" -- however on Wednesday it got worse as customers within the u. s. and Canada were hit. The outage seems primarily to have an effect on text messaging and web access, not essentially voice calling.
RIM (RIMM) held a quick teleconference for the press at 3:10 p.m. ET, on that executives said groups were "working round the clock" to repair the problems. Despite an enormous knowledge backlog, RIM won't drop any e-mails -- all messages can eventually be delivered, the corporate pledged.
The reps dodged many questions about make-good efforts for patrons.
Late Wednesday, RIM CIO Robin Bienfait posted a "service update" on the company's web site saying e-mail systems "are operating" in all regions. net browsing remained "temporarily unavailable" in Europe, the center East, India and Africa.
"We do everything in our power to revive regular service everywhere and to revive your trust in us," Bienfait wrote. "You've relied on us for reliable, real-time communications, and right away we're letting you down."
"The timing could not be worse," analysis firm Trefis wrote in an exceedingly note to subscribers, citing increased competition from Google's (GOOG, Fortune 500) Android phones and Apple's (AAPL, Fortune 500) iPhone, whose new 4S iteration goes on sale Friday.
The disruptions additionally offer ammunition to disgruntled investors, who need to get rid of and replace RIM's board. little activist shareholders together with Canada's Jaguar monetary Corp. are pushing the corporate to sell itself.
Angry clients: maybe most damning is that the impact on RIM's customer base. BlackBerry had over seventy million world subscribers as of September fifteen, however the outage might shove on-the-fence customers over the sting. After all, service disruptions are a minimum of an annual prevalence for the past many years.
"I are an analyst for twenty five years and have watched RIM wrestle with this same outage downside time when time," Jeff Kagan, an freelance telecom and technology analyst primarily based in Atlanta, wrote in an exceedingly analysis note.
In 2007, RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie attributed a BlackBerry e-mail outage to a "process error" that he promised "won't happen once more." February 2008 brought another outage; December 2009 brought 2 in but per week. Both U.S. and international users complained of disruptions in March 2010.
"For the primary time i'm currently saying yes... this new outage affects RIM over within the past," Kagan wrote. "This won't be the ultimate nail in RIM's coffin, however where within the past RIM continuously came back, this may offer customers yet one more reason to seem at different devices."
Room for competition to swoop in: RIM's rivals are acutely responsive to that, and they are "salivating" at this week's events, said Ramon Llamas, senior analysis analyst on mobile devices at IDC.
"This is meant to be BlackBerry's bread-and-butter, therefore when secure messaging breaks down for an unspecified amount of your time, individuals will definitely vent their frustrations," Llamas said.
It will be robust to mollify those customers quickly, as systemic failures will be sophisticated to diagnose and fix.
"This isn't Antennagate, where it is a device factor and you'll get a plastic cowl to repair it," Llamas said, touching on Apple's famous downside with its iPhone four hardware. "This could be a system-wide and growing breakdown."
If service issues still plague RIM, it'll undercut any positive moves on the device front. Customers will not care how smart the hardware is that if the phone merely will not work.
"It's a shame, as a result of the BlackBerry seven devices are sturdy," Llamas said. "But even with nice phones, individuals can begin factoring in these experiences. and that they might not be soon to forget."
RIM does not have abundant area for error left. Its last quarter was grim, with sales missing forecasts and RIM's new devices drawing mixed reviews. RIM's co-CEOs assured analysts and investors that the corporate is within the middle of a turnaround and can show improvement within the current quarter, that ends in November.
Next week they will have a high-profile platform for his or her efforts: RIM's annual U.S. developer conference, DevCon Americas, kicks off Tuesday in San Francisco. RIM plans to indicate off its forthcoming line of smartphones engineered around QNX, its next-generation operating system, and its "PlayBook a pair of.0" update for its struggling pill.
But at this time, PlayBooks and QNX phones might not be enough to win over cranky users, who have stormed Twitter with grumpy #DearBlackberry messages. Next week, they will have the prospect to deliver them in-person to RIM executives.
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