RIM says BlackBerry email delays continue worldwide

That service update was released by Technology in Motion in an email to business clients about 1 p.m. ET and a copy was obtained by Computerworld from several sources.

RIM's note as well said that the email delays affected both business clients using the BlackBerry Enterprise Server service and consumers and small businesses using BlackBerry Internet Service. BES requires a company to operate a server inside the corporate network and behind its firewall to transmit email and other messages. BIS does not require a special server and is on the whole sold as a monthly service through a wireless carrier.

RIM is adding capacity to the global RBridges to help with inter-region message delivery, however didn't give a timeline as to when that would be complete. The company offered an example of what problems might occur: A BES customer in the U.S. who sent an email to a UK customer with a BlackBerry smartphone containing a SIM would find that the UK device never got the BES email.

The service disruptions led to humor on Twitter accounts, often in tweets sent from PCs. "My BlackBerry is so secure, even I can't read my emails. Beat that iPhone," tweeted Nickpickles at noon ET.

Independent analyst Jeff Kagan was direct, saying in an email: "The RIM BlackBerry outage is not good news for the struggling company as it tries to improve going forward. In the past, these outages were annoyances. Today, with the growing smartphone sector and competitors like Apple iPhone and Google Android eating RIM's lunch, this BlackBerry outage could be very damaging to the company."

Matt Hamblen covers mobile and wireless, smartphones and other handhelds, and wireless networking for Computerworld. Follow Matt on Twitter at @matthamblen or subscribe to Matt's RSS feed . His e-mail address is mhamblen@computerworld.com .