Outage hits Telstra's BlackBerry network

In an e-mail to customers this afternoon, Telstra said there was "a possibility that service would be restored this afternoon, but due to international timeframes and the degree of coordination required, we have been conservative in our restoration estimates". However, in a 5pm update, Telstra confirmed service had "not yet been fully restored".

"Telstra's first priority is always to restore services and after this is achieved, a full investigation is conducted to identify the cause the disruption and take steps to try to minimise any such recurrence," the carrier said in its update.

The disruptions occurred from about 10am EST Wednesday and continued intermittently on Thursday.

The carrier said both the primary and standby links transporting traffic to Canada had failed. The former had experienced problems due to work being performed by a domestic carrier at the North American end and the latter was "unable to carry the backlog of e-mail traffic during business hours in Australia".

It said it had been provisioning a new international link while restoration of the existing primary link continued.

"The physical link for the service between Telstra and RIM is established and we are now working on the configuration of the data carriage over that link".

BlackBerry customers who called Telstra's support line told ZDNet Australia  they were told the fault was a 'severity one' outage.

The customers said they were still experiencing problems receiving e-mail on their devices this morning.

Rival BlackBerry provider Vodafone was quick to point out it had not experienced any difficulties with its service, guaranteeing its secondary link to RIM would be able to handle all traffic in the event its primary links fails.