14 DAY TRIAL // Canadian mobile phone maker Research in Motion has had its BlackBerry service down for the past two days, and users have started to receive a message via the BlackBerry Messenger service (BBM) that has been labeled as “hoax.” RIM has taken an official stance on the matter, encouraging users not to take it into consideration and, most important, not to forward it to more people.
For those out of the loop, we should note that the BlackBerry service has been hit with an outage since yesterday, and that users are still being affected by the issue all around the world,
The said message reads the following:
This is the real broadcast from BlackBerry© All rights reserved. Broadcast this message to every single contact on your BBM© …
We need our active users to re-send this message to everyone on your contact list in order to confirm our active users that use BlackBerry Messenger, if you do not send this message to all your BlackBerry Messenger contacts then your account will remain inactive with the consequence of losing all your contacts.
According to RIM, users should disregard the message, since it was not sent from the company. They should not send it over to their BBM contacts.
“Rest assured that this email message did not originate from Research In Motion (RIM), the company behind the BlackBerry solution. It is simply a hoax chain message and we recommend that users simply ignore the message and do not forward it,” BlackBerry representative said, according to fm.co.za.
The company has been also posting info on the hoax message via its Twitter account, warning users that the viral message did not originate from the BlackBerry maker.
Apparently, the outage that hit all BlackBerry users started with the crashing of servers on Monday. It affected South Africa, Europe and the Middle East, but the service was restored for a short period of time, only to go down again. No ETA for when the service will be up again