BlackBerry Outages: How Much Heartache Can One Woman Take?

BlackBerry e-mail stopped working Tuesday night, the second outage in less than a week. Frustrated BlackBerry users – this one included -- railed against the parent company, RIM, on Twitter so much that the word "BlackBerry" has been trending for over 15 hours as I write this.

( For those of you who don't tweet, "trending" refers to the top ten most-searched terms in real-time on Twitter.)

Last night, when I hadn't received an e-mail for over an hour, I wondered if everyone was putting down their CrackBerrys for the holiday week.

Desperate, I tried getting on UberTwitter on my BlackBerry but just got an arrow circling constantly. Was I the only one still obsessively checking for e-mails and tweets?

Thinking it was my device, I hooked it up to my laptop and tried to re-install the software. No luck. Finally, going the old-fashioned route, I called Verizon tech support and was told by a very polite woman that BlackBerry was down. Was it me? No, she said, it's a wide-spread outage.

My beloved BlackBerry and I have been together, without a breakup, since 1999. So frustrated that once again I was without my constant companion, I tweeted from my laptop: "BlackBerry outage AGAIN. Are you friggin' kidding me RIM!?!"

Tuesday's outage comes on the heels of one last Thursday, which was worse because it occurred in the middle of a workday. I had lunch with my editor, but was terrified to leave my desk without a working BlackBerry.

"BlackBerry outage is like I lost my child. Scared to leave the computer for lunch meeting. Is this what the end of the world will be like?" I tweeted on Dec. 17 at 12:27pm.

During lunch, I found myself oddly focused during that charming old-school thing called inter-personal communication, but still my mind wandered to what e-mails I was missing and what was going on in the world outside of the table at Red, Hot and Blue.

Two hours later, from my then-functional BlackBerry, I tweeted, "Hallelujah! Blackberry is back on... Feel like I got pardoned by the governor."

So what happened Tuesday night? "Root cause is currently under review, but based on preliminary analysis, it currently appears that the issue stemmed from a flaw in two recently released versions of BlackBerry Messenger," Research In Motion Ltd. (RIM) said in a statement Wednesday.

I can summarize the rest of the statement with: "Blah Blah Blah."

RIM's excuse for the second BlackBerry outage in a week is that a messenger app had gone awry? Not good enough, guys. If this happens again, I'm going to start testing the Google Droid – the one with the built-in keyboard.

BlackBerry and I have been together for 10 years now, but loyalty and monogamy only go as long as the man -- I mean the device -- pulls its own weight.

If your BlackBerry is working, you can vent or follow me on Twitter @EmilyMillerDC.