People on the BlackBerry outage newsgroup began reporting problems at around 6 a.m. Eastern Time related to scheduled maintenance on Research In Motion's network. The issue appeared to get progressively worse, initially affecting about half of users in the Americas but eventually affecting all users, according to newsgroup postings

In a major turnaround for Microsoft, the company Thursday promised "greater transparency" in its development and business practices, outlining a new strategy to provide more access to APIs and previously proprietary protocols for some of its major software products, including Windows and Office. The move, inspired by the ongoing antitrust case against Microsoft in the European Union, shows the company finally acknowledging the significant impact open source and open standards have had on the industry and the company's own business.

Pakistan's effort to censor YouTube over the weekend ended up briefly blocking the popular online video site around the globe.

"For about two hours [on Sunday], traffic to YouTube was routed according to erroneous Internet Protocols, and many users around the world could not access our site," said a YouTube spokesperson via e-mail. "We have determined that the source of these events was a network in Pakistan. We are investigating and working with others in the Internet community to prevent this from happening again." On Friday, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority directed the country's Internet service providers to begin blocking YouTube for distributing offensive content.