BlackBerry Outages Have Resulted in Decreased Accidents - Report

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Don’t text and drive. Perhaps the message is not strong enough, as smartphone and mobile users still use their phones for messaging while on the road. But with the BlackBerry outages last week, authorities say the roads have been safer for motorists, at least in the Middle East.

Police in Dubai report that vehicular accidents have dropped 20% from the average during the BlackBerry outages. Meanwhile, in Abu Dhabi, accidents fell 40% and there have been no fatal accidents recorded during that time.

The authorities link this decline in car accidents to the service outages that have disrupted BlackBerry Messaging, web browsing and other online services for a large part of the previous week. Authorities say Dubai gets an accident every three minutes on average. Meanwhile, in Abu Dhabi, there is a fatal accident every other day.

Both affluent countries in the United Arab Emirates are big BlackBerry users, with RIM’s platform getting a 44% market share. In contrast, Apple’s iPhone only gets 30% of the market. Users have not been so aware of the dangers of texting — and doing other things like email, chat and calls — while driving, although the recent death of a football celebrity from a texting-related accident has prompted authorities to ramp up their campaign against texting and driving, which was an effort that has been launched fairly recently.

RIM’s BlackBerry service suffered major outages in the U.S., Asia, Europe and Africa the past week due to server glitches. The company has since fully restored their service, although users in some regions cite frequent outages as one reason for switching to other platforms like the Apple iPhone 4S.