In an internal statement to employees, Orange explains its decision to temporarily suspend BlackBerry Bold sales while Research in Motion works on an industry wide fix.

Internal Orange Statement on the Bold:”Following reports of software issues with the BlackBerry Bold handset across a variety of mobile operators, Orange has decided to act in the interest of its customers by suspending shipments of the device in the UK. We are currently awaiting feed back from RIM as to when an industry wide fix for these issues will be in place, and expect this suspension to be an interim measure.We apologize for any inconvenience this issue may cause you.”next steps BlackBerry/RIM are doing everything they can to resolve this issue and will be completing full testing and validation to ensure future handsets do not have any quality issues. This may take a couple of weeks so it’s up to us to do what’s best for our customers.

It may not be all AT&T after all. If other carriers around the world follow suite, the Microsoft takeover that we talked about in the last post seems a lot more plausible.

[Source]