BlackBerry Outage Affects Service for Millions Worldwide, Again
Millions of BlackBerry device users in Europe, the Middle East and Africa – the EMEA region – were without Web access, email, and messaging capabilities Monday following a power outage that impacted server systems in the United Kingdom. On Tuesday, the service disruptions occurred again, this time also disrupting the service of some users in India and three South American countries.
The Guardian reported that Monday's power outage appears to have impacted server systems in Slough, U.K. that belong to Research in Motion Ltd., BlackBerry's parent company. The loss of service had been sporadic for customers since the outage began around 11 a.m. BST (6 a.m. EDT).
The Web browsing and messaging capabilities of BlackBerry devices are filtered through RIM's central server system before connecting to the Internet, which can cause big issues if these servers have any problems.
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The Waterloo, Ontario-based company acknowledged the situation several hours after customers began being affected.
"We are working to resolve an issue currently impacting some BlackBerry subscribers in Europe, Middle East and Africa," RIM said in a brief statement nearly four hours after the problems started on Monday. "We're investigating, and we apologize to our customers for any inconvenience caused whilst this is resolved."
After several hours service was fully restored, but the company was forced to apologize for “messaging and browsing delays” on Tuesday, this time adding India, Brazil, Chile and Argentina to the list of affected areas.
Du, a Dubai-based telecommunications company, posted a Twitter message that estimated approximately half of BlackBerry subscribers in the EMEA region were without service on Monday. If so, it is a significant portion of RIM's subscriber base, which consists of more than 70 million people worldwide.
T-Mobile's U.K. support team received a number of complaints, but, as they told one customer via Twitter, “the issue is with RIM and nothing to do with T-Mobile. Sorry.”
In addition to Du and T-Mobile, other major companies that have reported service disruption problems include Bahrain Telecommunications Co. and Qatar Telecom (Qtel) in the United Arab Emirates.
Fox News reported that the initial outage followed on the heels of an announcement by Jim Balsillie, co-CEO of RIM, in which he said that the company would soon provide a service allowing customers on new BlackBerry smartphones to share documents and other information simply by tapping their phones together. Balsillie made the announcement as a part of GITEX Technology Week in Dubai earlier Monday.
As of the writing of this article the BlackBerry service issues have not been fixed, but RIM says it is “working to restore normal service as quickly as possible.”
