OntheWilderSide

(excerpt from) Electronista
BlackBerry, phones back up in Egypt, briefly down here (North America)
updated 11:50 am EST, Sat January 29, 2011

RIM faced mixed blessings on Saturday as service came back in  Egypt but suffered a temporary North American outage. NBC’s Richard Engel reported (below) that at least some BlackBerry service had come back in Egypt following a total blockade on Friday. Others have noted that phone service appeared to be back up as a whole for Vodafone and other Egyptian carriers…

Simultaneous with the restoration, however, RIM reported an outage of BlackBerry Internet Service across North America. All Canadian and US carriers lost access to the web, BlackBerry Messenger and certain e-mail service on Saturday morning. RIM has since said it fixed the issue. It didn’t explain the causes, but it followed on a Verizon-specific flaw for a week that produced erratic BIS access. BlackBerry service has been more reliable in the past year and didn’t have a directly attributable reason…

Other reports that BlackBerry service was down for some part of today:

* www.newsobserver.com
* www.premiershipnews.org

(excerpt from)
An article from NY Magazine about the potential for using and internet kill switch  in the US
1/28/2011

…But “kill switches” aren’t just the province of contested regimes in the Middle East and Asia. Earlier this week, Senator Joe Lieberman brought back a bill he first introduced last summer that would give President Obama power over privately owned Internet providers and computer systems during a “national cyberemergency.” The revised version of the Lieberman-Collins bill now includes language stipulating that the federal government designation “shall not be subject to judicial review.”…

Filed under: international politics, News, politics, US Politics Tagged: | Blackberry, BlackBerry Messenger, BlackBerry outage, Blackberry Service, cyberemergency, Egypt demonstrations, Egyptian politics, Government censorship, internet outage, Lieberman, Lieberman-Collin