BlackBerry Outage Hits Wall Street

Submitted by Chris Gaetano on Thu, 10/13/2011 - 10:26

Wall Street’s dependence on BlackBerry smartphones became painfully apparent as the network’s outage this week caused chaos throughout the financial sector, according to the New York Times.

The phone’s network, Research in Motion, was experiencing major outages over the last few days, allegedly due to a failed switch that caused service to be interrupted in Asia, Latin America, Europe, Africa and, now, North America. The outage disrupted communications between financial workers, many of who are now without the instant access to e-mail and Internet that they’ve come to rely on, said the Times.

Even many of those whose phones are working are being advised by their company's IT staff to refrain from sending communications due to worries that they may not be as secure.

Many bankers were left frustrated by the irritating outage, with one senior banker in London calling the experience "a real pain," according to Reuters. The last major BlackBerry outage happened about two years ago, said Reuters.

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