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PELHAM, N.Y. There are about 70 million BlackBerry users in the world and for the past three days, millions of people have been without service.
The service outage began Monday in the Middle East, Europe and Africa it has since spread to South America and Asia on Tuesday and hit the United States and Canada this morning, according to published reports.
While users can make calls, the outage is affecting text messaging and Internet access.
In a statement released Tuesday, the smartphone company said messaging and browsing delays being experienced by BlackBerry users in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, India, Brazil, Chile and Argentina were caused by a core switch failure by Research in Motion (RIM), the phones manufacturer. Although the system is designed to failover to a back-up switch, the failover did not function as previously tested.
Sales representatives at local cell phone stores in Pelham said they are not surprised about this recent failure of BlackBerry.
Tommy Lewis, a salesman at the Verizon store said he had mixed feelings about the recent failure with RIM. Due to the emergence of the iPhone and the Droid, BlackBerry is becoming more obsolete, he said. However, many people still use BlackBerrys, so this does come as somewhat of a shock, he said.
"BlackBerry is infamous for global," Lewis said.
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