If you have a Blackberry smart phone, then you may be one of the many experiencing an outage of Blackberry's messaging service. This outage started 3 days ago in Europe, and has now reached North America. This outage affects tens of millions worldwide, especially in the Middle East where Blackberry is very popular.

Blackberry Service Outages Spreads To The US
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In the Middle East, Blackberry is the choice of many because of the encrypted messaging. Governments can't read what's going in or out, and have been pressuring Research in Motion to let them be able to see messages. But they have so far been steadfastly saying "No" to them. Most likely this is one of the main reasons governments didn't see the Arab Spring protests for reform and freedom swelling up so quickly. All this is going on now, while Apple prepares to launch the iPhone 4S tomorrow. Blackberry has been on the ropes for some time now, as they have been hemorrhaging  market share for some time now. This may be the final tolling of the bell for Research in Motion, maker of the Blackberry phone. It was revealed that a core switch, which routes calls through a phone systems, failed and is the primary cause of the outage, but that was soon fixed. The problem now is, all the backed up volume of messages is overloading servers, and that is slowing it down to a standstill.

Apple however is preparing to launch the iPhone 4S and pre-orders of the new phone have sold out. About 1 million were reported sold via the pre-order process. And with this problem plaguing Blackberry, will this cause users to jump from their phone to Apple's? As with all things, time will tell.

Do you have a Blackberry being affected by the outage? What do you think about it? Will you be switching? Share and let us know.

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