BlackBerry services come back to life

Service disrupted in Pakistan for four days till Thursday evening.

KARACHI: BlackBerry’s users in Pakistan, for the fourth consecutive day, experienced trouble receiving e-mails and exchanging messages through their widely used messenger service on Thursday.

However, Research in Motion – Canada-based owner of BlackBerry –in statement issued on Thursday night said that it had resolved the ‘technical issues’ that had frustrated BlackBerry users, but it might take a while for service to return to complete normalcy.

Disruptions started in Europe and Asia a few days back and slowly trickled to five continents.

“Problems still persist,” said Ufone head of public relations and corporate social responsibility Moazzam Ali Khan on Thursday evening. “Services are still going on and off,” added Khan. Ufone provides BlackBerry services for Rs1,000 a month that gives you access to BlackBerry Messenger (BBM), a convenient push e-mail system and unlimited internet browsing.

He further said that BlackBerry service providers in Pakistan are working on the issue but no time-frame has been given for complete restoration of the services. An official in a telecom company that provides BlackBerry service said on the condition of anonymity that RIM is monitoring their data service, which is an indication that the problem has not been resolved as yet.

A core switch failure within RIM’s infrastructure caused disruptions in the messaging and browsing service, RIM said in a statement. It added that their system had a back-up switch but that also failed thus caused a large backlog of data.

BlackBerry users contacted by The Express Tribune contacted gave a mixed response with some saying service has gotten better while the others said problems still persist.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 14^th, 2011.