Blackberry Outage Causes Havoc

A major outage of the service that runs the Blackberry handheld devices lead to havoc all over North America Monday. Business people who usually maximize every second of productivity out of their days with no allowance for unplanned downtime found themselves totally unplugged.

Without their electronic security blankets, the stranded Blackberry users were forced to engage in unfamiliar activities: making phone calls on an actual phone, talking to human beings face to face, and even looking where they were going when driving and walking across the street!

The maker of the Blackberry, Canadian firm Research in Motion (RIM) had what it described as a "critical severity outage" affecting users in the Americas. A news article said that RIM notified its customers of the Blackberry outage by e-mail... though RIM didn't seem to explain how Blackberry users would get that e-mail if their Blackberry units weren't receiving a signal.

Maybe that Federal Express Super Bowl commercial with the fleet of carrier pigeons is on to something...