Research In Motion (RIM) has said it is investigating the reason why
email services were disrupted for millions of BlackBerry owners in
Europe, Africa and the Middle East, due to a crash that allegedly
originated from a RIM data centre in Slough.
Although emailing services do appear to be back to normal, the
company has warned that Internet browsing and instant messaging services
such as BBM may continue to run slower than usual until the problem is
resolved entirely.
When the disruption broke yesterday afternoon (10th October), the
company released the following statement: “Our technical teams are
working to return services to normal operation as quickly as possible.
“We apologise to our customers for any inconvenience and we will
continue to provide updates as new information becomes available.”
Although
many personal mobile users were affected by the outage, it’s believed
that the inconvenience to corporate phone owners is restricted, owing to
the fact that BlackBerry has two separate servers for consumers and
businesses.
The bad news is the latest in a string of negative press for RIM,
with the media continually reporting on how the company’s BlackBerry
brand is losing market share to rivals such as HTC and the Apple iPhone,
which is beginning to develop ties with corporate clients owing to
strengthened security for business email that rivals the encryption
standards, which made BlackBerry a favoured brand in the first place.
