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North American Blackberry users suffered their second outage in a week early Tuesday evening. For about eight hours, messaging, email and some Internet service were out, but users could still send and receive phone calls and texts.

During the outage, Twitter lit up with BlackBerry users asking if anyone else was having problems with their phone email. Within five hours of the outage, BlackBerry was the top search query on Google and a trending topic on the Twitter homepage.

In a statement issued to the Canadian press, Research in Motion (RIM), manufacturer of BlackBerry phones, wrote:

"Based on preliminary analysis, it currently appears that the issue stemmed from a flaw in two recently released versions of BlackBerry Messenger (versions 5.0.0.55 and 5.0.0.56) that caused an unanticipated database issue within the BlackBerry infrastructure," the spokesperson wrote. "RIM has taken corrective action to restore service."

BlackBerry Messenger is RIM's proprietary instant messaging system that offers messaging from one BlackBerry user to another. It can be used worldwide without additional international charges. After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the BB Messaging Service was one of the only open communication channels available to emergency responders. It's a valuable system, but one potential weakness is that it must be updated by users on a routine basis.

The fix

Surprisingly, the fix that RIM issued has no obvious connection to the most common problems resulting from the "flaw" — email failure.

RIM recommends "anyone who downloaded or upgraded BlackBerry Messenger since Dec. 14 should upgrade to version 5.0.0.57, which resolves the issue. The update is available now through BlackBerry browsers at blackberry.com/messenger or BlackBerry App World.

Even users who do not use BlackBerry Messenger should install the update as it apparently affects them as well. Enterprise clients using BlackBerry Enterprise Server software were not affected.

Damage control is a real problem for RIM. Yes, the technical issue seems to have been repaired, but communicating the news and its solution to BlackBerry users fell short this time. And RIM has repeatedly broken its promise that such outages will not happen again. After an outage in 2007, RIM CEO Jim Balsillie said, "It was a process error that we had that's been fixed. It shouldn't have happened, and it won't happen again."

But subsequent widespread outages occurred on Feb. 11, 2008, Dec. 17, 2009 and — the most recent one — Dec. 22, 2009. According to a comScore report issued in Oct., 14 million Americans use a BlackBerry compared to 8.9 million iPhone users.

Users deserve better communication

If millions of users turn to Twitter, RIM could do the same. On July 3, 2009, Authorize.net, the Internet's largest online transaction provider, went down due to a fire in a Seattle data center. Within an hour, Authorize.net launched a Twitter page that reported the problem, updated the status of the service, and responded in real time to customer questions.

In addition to a Twitter page, RIM could also put news front and center on its webpage. A visit to the site revealed the last Troubleshooting Tip for Top Issues was dated Sept. 9, 2009.

Old-school communication is not sufficient for alerting millions of users to a problem with their phone service. Advanced devices deserve advanced news distribution..