What’s up with RIM? What’s up with BlackBerry? And how wise is it to rely so much on the device?

BlackBerry service went out yesterday for several hours, affecting both Canadian and American users across all sorts of carriers. Rogers Wireless, AT&T and Sprint all experience a BlackBerry failure, with no e-mails being processed by RIM. By nighttime EST, service has been resumed.

A similar outage occurred last year, though RIM was largely incommunicado during that incident. At least this time the corp acknowledged that something was up.

Stepping back for a minute, how smart is this, depending on one company’s apparently flakey service for vital communications? You literally can’t walk down Wall Street without seeing Charlie Sheen wannabes tooling around with their BlackBerry. I don’t like the idea of my finances being held hostage because some server in Ontario crashed.

Again, BlackBerrys Are Disrupted by a Technical Snag [New York Times]