BlackBerry Owners Face Second Service Outage in a Week

The BlackBerry is one of the most popular handheld devices in the world today because it offers instant and reliable access to email, instant messaging and of course voice communication. Unfortunately, none of these lovely features were available during a recent outage -- the second of its kind in the past week.

Let's face it -- there isn't much advantage to having instant access to your friends, family, and colleagues when the handheld network you use is out of service. That was the case on Tuesday night, when for the second time in less than a week the BlackBerry service went out of service, causing owners of the handheld to lose access to email, text messaging, and Internet services like social networking sites Twitter and Facebook.

Outage Blamed on BlackBerry Messenger

The outage lasted overnight and was not restored until early Wednesday morning. The cause? BlackBerry producer Research in Motion (RIM) has blamed the problem on an issue with its instant messaging program, dubbed BlackBerry Messenger.

"Based on preliminary analysis, it appears a flaw in two recently released versions of BlackBerry Messenger caused an unanticipated database issue within the BlackBerry infrastructure," Waterloo, Canada-based RIM revealed. (Source: wired.com)

RIM Encourages Users to Update Software

In order to prevent another outage, RIM is encouraging all users of its BlackBerry devices to upgrade to the newest edition of its BlackBerry messenger, version 5.0.0.57. (Source: computerworld.com)

The outage is troubling for more than just BlackBerry owners. With the iPhone rising in popularity and more developers than ever before offering their own versions of the increasingly beloved smartphone, the margin of error in this market is shrinking dramatically.

Apple Represents Strong Competitor

Research in Motion has thus far shipped 75 million BlackBerry devices, putting once unknown Waterloo, Ontario on the technological map, so to speak.

Still, all that success has only made competition more fierce. The main problem may be Apple, which continues to dominate in the number of applications offered to owners of the iPhone versus the BlackBerry -- currently the score stands at about 100,000 to just 2,000.