Research In Motion's ongoing BlackBerry outage overseas began affecting smartphone users in the Americas on Wednesday, with many BlackBerry users -- from business executives and investors on Wall Street to lawmakers on Capitol Hill -- in a tizzy over their inability to communicate normally.
"BlackBerry subscribers in the Americas may be experiencing intermittent service delays this morning," RIM said in a statement Wednesday. "We are working to resolve the situation as quickly as possible."
On Tuesday, RIM blamed a core switch failure for causing the ongoing outage plaguing BlackBerry users in Europe, the Middle East and Africa since Monday. The company also said another feature of the system -- which is designed to failover to a back-up switch -- did not function as previously tested.
With the spread of BlackBerry outages to the Americas, however, industry observers believe the underlying infrastructure problems must be even more serious than what RIM has admitted to date.
"A switch is a piece of hardware that can always fail," said IDC 
analyst Francisco Jeronimo. "But it shouldn't take three days to replace a switch and have services up and running again, and we don't know why the backup didn't work."
Moreover, a switch failure overseas would not have an impact on other switches in North America. "So this [explanation] is quite odd," Jeronimo said in a telephone interview Wednesday.
Damage Control
On the other hand, all handset vendors have experienced problems with their products and services at one time or another, Jeronimo said. Apple, for example, received a huge number of complaints due to a faulty iPhone antenna-design issue last year.
"Carriers will continue to consider RIM as an alternative to Apple and Google," Jeronimo said. But the BlackBerry maker needs to completely "explain what happened and communicate what RIM will do to ensure this will not happen again," Jeronimo said.
Still, Piper Jaffray analyst Andrew Murphy believes that RIM's current service issues may benefit Apple's iPhone sales somewhat going forward. "I see it giving Apple's new iMessage feature a new talking point," Murphy said in an e-mail Wednesday. But the "impacts [will be] pretty small [and] felt over time" rather than as "a big spike," he said.
Two carriers in the Middle East have already begun offering their BlackBerry customers compensation -- which the operators will doubtlessly attempt to recoup from RIM. "We may see operators in Europe asking for compensation but nothing has been announced yet," Jeronimo said. (continued...)
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