Last night marked the third time and it pains me to say this that RIM (Research in Motion – BlackBerry) has failed me in the last week. This last bbm/internet outage lasted almost the whole night. It was long enough for my girlfriend to kind of start freaking out about it and my sister to call me to be befuddled about it. Apparently the issue stemmed from a bad update to BlackBerry Messenger (BBM).

RIM’s apology

Last night a service interruption occurred that affected BlackBerry customers in the Americas and it appears that the issue stemmed from a flaw in two recently released versions of BlackBerry Messenger (versions 5.0.0.55 and 5.0.0.56) that caused an unanticipated database issue within the BlackBerry infrastructure. RIM apologizes to its customers for any inconvenience and has taken corrective action to restore service.

A new version of BlackBerry Messenger (version 5.0.0.57) is available and we particularly encourage anyone who downloaded or upgraded BlackBerry Messenger since December 14th to upgrade to this latest version which resolves an issue that exists in the two previous versions (5.0.0.55 and 5.0.0.56). To download the most current version of BlackBerry Messenger software, please visit www.blackberry.com/blackberrymessenger and follow the on-screen instructions…

I think it’s funny that he link RIM provided for the fix does work when using a BlackBerry Browser and wasn’t working on my computer until just a few moments ago. I’m also a little perturbed that I pay 30 bucks a month for a service that has stopped working three times this month. Last night realized what it feels like to be on AT&T… (please don’t sue me)

Uber-Flail, BlackBerry.

All seems to back to normal in the BlackBerry world now, though, if patterns foretell the future, we should be expecting another outage in a few days…

If you’re still running BBM 5.0.0.55 or 56, download the newest non-server crashing version at http://mobile.blackberry.com using your BlackBerry browser.

Last night reminds me how utterly dependent we as a society I’m getting on technologies. But that’s enough of that.