RIM’s BBM Service Suffers Partial Outage In Canada, Latin America

RIM, to put it mildly, has been having it rough these past few days. Among other things, they’ve failed to hit their quarterly revenue goal, sold far fewer PlayBooks than they had hoped, and potentially let their market share slip into the single digits.

After all that, RIM didn’t need any more problems, but another one has popped up anyway: it seems that their BBM and email service is partially down in a handful of countries.

A quick Twitter search shows that subscribers in Canada and Latin America seem to be the most stricken by the partial outages, with the Financial Post reporting that pockets of users on three of Canada’s carriers (Rogers, Bell, and WIND) have been affected. Meanwhile on the southern front, NTN24 states that the partial outage has affected people in Venezuela, Colombia, Panamá, Chile, México and Argentina. The outage may even be more widespread, as the Huffington Post reports that sporadic tweets from the UK and Egypt indicate similar service issues.

https://twitter.com/#!/BlackBerryHelp/status/114744172682027009

RIM has acknowledged the outage on their official BlackBerryHelp account, but the feed has yet to offer any salient details. In fairness, this may not be an end-of-the-world scenario for BlackBerry users, but the timing for RIM is atrocious. While I’m sure they have teams fighting to find a fix, consumer confidence in the Waterloo-based company may dip even more as a result of today’s issues.

This is a developing story, and will update as we hear more.