Blackberry Blackout: A Personal Story

Last night we had dinner in the West Village with a partner at a law firm, his wife and four young women. After a few too many blood orange margaritas a debate broke out among the women about exactly when a French-fluent Midwestern girl named Sandra had moved to France for her Paris office. Someone said September. Someone else said October. We ordered another Michelada.

So the did the usual thing we do when we have unresolved questions: we blackberried for an answer. It was still a bit early for Sandra to be awake in Paris but only just. We were confident we’d get an answer over after dinner drinks.

Cut to an hour and half later. We’ve been joined by a couple of more friends. One Merrill guy who spends an unlikely amount of time rock-climbing. Another guy who works somewhere that no-one ever remembers. The bartender serves a fourth round of cocktails. We take the top off ours, then the bottom. Time seems to be moving very quickly but somehow none of our songs have come on the jukebox.

“That’s strange,” the blonde who is trying to grow her hair out after years of wearing it in a severe short chop. “My emails aren’t sending.”

No-one had received any emails for the past couple of hours. Someone wondered if the bar had some sort of blackberry interference device operating. But that wasn’t it.

It was only this morning we learned that blackberry maker Research In Motion's entire network in the Western hemisphere had gone down. We woke up this morning with our cell phone ringing with the news. Our cell phone never rings in the morning.

"If a banker sends a blackberry and no-one reads it does he really exist," the caller said.

This is going to be an interesting morning.

Let us know your Blackberry Blackout stories in the comments section below. Or send them to tips@dealbreaker.com Is yours working? When did it go down? What sort of chaos was caused by the sudden cut-off in instant, everywhere emails?

9:01 Update:Some readers are reporting that their messages are coming through. Others still are waiting. It seems the backlog of messages may be jamming the pipes that make the blackberry magic work.

9:21 Update:DealBook reports that some banks have service while others still have problems. "BlackBerry owners at J.P. Morgan Chase and Citigroup said they were getting service as usual; a worker at Deutsche Bank reported problems accessing e-mail via BlackBerry," DealBook says.

9:41 Update:The latest twist is that outgoing messages seem to be going, well, out but the incoming messages are still backed-up for a lot of service providers.

10:00 Update: Best reader comment: "Right in the middle of earnings season blackberry shuts down. Greatest disclosure of product risk ever."

[The picture above is of DealBreaker's landlord Pearl nervously chewing her blackberry, waiting for the network to return.]