NO SERVICE

BlackBerry Outage Spreads to U.S.

Customers report delayed and missing emails.

More bad news for BlackBerry. Disruptions to the smartphone’s service, now in the third day, have spread to North America. Research in Motion said a switch failed and then a backup failed as well, causing disruptions to phone users in Europe, the Middle East, India, Latin America, Africa—and now apparently Japan, Singapore, the U.S., and Canada. The disruptions in North America appear to be relatively minor, consisting of delayed or missing emails.The company said that the problem has been fixed, but that it will take time to work through the “backlog” of data. Several carriers have offered users compensation for the inconvenience, and may request compensation from RIM itself in turn.