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BlackBerry Blackout

Yesterday afternoon (April 17), many BlackBerry users in the Western Hemisphere, which now range from herds of suit and tie business people to super connected grade school children, experienced a service interruption with the email component of their digital device. The service failure, although remedied in most areas of the United States and Canada by early today, amounted to a crippling business and communication hindrance, but also brought many flat-thumbed BlackBerry-aholics to the shocking realization of their tech addiction, and for most, it’s total requisite.

Research In Motion Ltd. (RIM), the Canadian-based company that owns BlackBerry and claims over 8 million users worldwide, is currently investigating the cause of the problem, and stated that service may be slow to reboot due to an enormous backlog of emails. But the solution may arrive too late for some owners, as countless users take to the web, count the seconds until iPhone’s release, map BlackBerry connection locales, and trade stories of disconnect.

Here’s what bloggers are saying about BlackBerry’s service crash:

“Mine is down. Ugh, this blows.” — Ashley, engadgetmobile.com

“I just got service back this morning. That was inconvenient.” — Matt, doubleshotoflife.com

“I hear the sound of a thousand executives weeping…I guess since their thumbs are getting their first break in years, the numbness is wearing off.” — Paula, engadget.com

“You know you are addicted to your BlackBerry when there is a system outage and you feel like you have lost your best friend.” — Changingtide, changingtide.livejournal.com

“And you wonder why they call it CrackBerry, you tech richies are fucking dorks.” — Jim5, webmaske.com

“Well, thankfully the BlackBerry outage occurred during the evening or I would have been suffering some major withdrawals. I admit, I am addicted. But it helps me keep atop my work email and I can be connected from anywhere. If I didn’t have it, my work email would back up and it would take so long to get caught up. Especially with all the spam that I get.” — milehighsoapbox.com

Talk: Do you have an addiction?