BlackBerry Maker Is Strained by Growth

The second BlackBerry outage in a week shows how Research In Motion Ltd. (RIMM), the maker of the popular smart phone, is feeling the strain of a ballooning customer base and intensifying competition.

BlackBerry devices throughout the Americas suffered service interruptions from Tuesday afternoon through early Wednesday, telecommunications carriers said. RIM issued an apology and attributed the interruption to a flaw in recent versions of its instant-messaging program.

The glitch caused an “unanticipated database issue within the BlackBerry infrastructure,” the company said. RIM declined to elaborate or make an executive available for comment.

The back-to-back problems strike at one of the biggest selling points for the Waterloo, Ontario, handset maker: reliability. RIM tells customers–many of them big corporations that use BlackBerrys for internal email–that its services are more secure and more stable than those of its rivals.

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