In case you missed it, Research in Motion (RIM) just suffered a crippling outage that has affected BlackBerry customers across five continents. And by crippling, we really mean it – this multi-day fiasco was longest to disruption to BlackBerry service since it the device was introduced more than 10 years ago. The outages began Monday in Europe, Africa and the Middle East and have since spread through India and South America, reaching North America yesterday. The culprit? RIM’s centralized architecture that routes all BlackBerry traffic (web and email) through the company’s centralized infrastructure. Jenna Wortham of the New York Times explained, “Because RIM sends its data through its own servers, any disruptions are felt by larger swaths of users than for other handset makers.” Wortham’s referring to RIM and other companies in telecom, though the sentiment certainly applies to IAM. All services suffer outages from time to time.