The Latest BlackBerry Blackout

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Rivals Rush In

Additionally, the service failure seemed to be more acute among users of RIM BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES), and less so among users of its BlackBerry Internet Service, says Kort, the Gartner analyst. BES users are classic, corporate BlackBerry users whose companies run BlackBerry server software on their own internal servers. BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS) users tend to be the ones who buy their own devices, and use them primarily to access their personal e-mail accounts. "BIS users seem to have been unaffected or at least less affected than the BES users," Kort says.

Competitors will find it hard to resist pouncing on the problems of RIM, the market leader in wireless e-mail. Motorola (MOT), for instance, has been pushing hard to gain ground in the market, and in January acquired Good Technology, which offers services and software similar to RIM's. "I wouldn't be surprised at all to see Motorola try to capitalize on this," says analyst Sean Ryan of IDC.

Microsoft (MSFT) didn't hesitate. The software giant, which sells its own wireless e-mail technology, reached out to the media after the BlackBerry outage to say that such crashes don't happen with the company's wireless e-mail. The reason: Microsoft's wireless service runs on the same servers as the company's traditional Exchange e-mail—and doesn't require a separate network like RIM's.

"A Short-Term Annoyance"

Rob Sanderson, an analyst with American Technology Research in San Francisco, said the outage would likely have little effect on RIM's business prospects. "In the past this sort of thing has been more a short-term annoyance than having any sustainable business impact," he said. "We don't yet know the cause, but most popular services suffer some periods of growing pain. I think more important is how frequent are interruptions and how quickly service is restored. RIM seems to be pretty reliable and responsive."

If there was one lucky draw for RIM, the outage took place during a period of relatively light e-mail use. The first word of the service break hit the news wires at about 8 p.m. EDT, and was restored before 7 a.m. Greg Tozian, vice-president at Internet advertising firm Overland Agency in Portland, Ore., said he noticed that several e-mails he'd sent from the device were marked with a red 'X' indicating they hadn't been sent. "Then there were scads of e-mail coming in all at once at 6:44 this morning," he says. "Luckily, it wasn't during business hours when I was trying to get something done."

Perhaps a BlackBerry blackout then is not always such a terrible thing, if it happens at night and only very rarely. The outage no doubt led to dinner conversations marked by fewer distractions from vibrating electronic devices and more opportunities for engaging in the world beyond the tiny electronic screen.

Perhaps there was more time for pondering larger philosophical issues about the human relationship with technology. Consider this posting on the Wall Street blog Dealbreaker.com: "If a banker sends a BlackBerry and no-one reads it, does he really exist?"

Hesseldahl is a reporter at BusinessWeek.com in New York. With Cliff Edwards in Silicon Valley.