A network outage has struck BlackBerry users in the EMEA region this morning — on, irony of ironies, iPhone 5 launch day — affecting BBM, email and internet but not voice or text. Fall is a troublesome season for the company which experienced the largest outage in its network’s history last October, causing then co-CEO Mike Lazaridis to appear on YouTube in person to present an excruciating autocue apology for letting customers down.
RIM confirmed the outage in a tweet this morning, noting: “Some users in Europe, Middle East & Africa are experiencing issues with their BlackBerry service”. A follow up tweet added: “We are investigating and apologise for any inconvenience.”
At the time of writing RIM was unable to provide specific details of the cause of the outage, which TechCrunch understands is still ongoing, or details of how many BlackBerry users are affected. Last year’s week-long worldwide BlackBerry network outage was initially caused by the failure of a core switch at a UK datacenter which in turn triggered a wider “cascade failure” – as then co-CEO Lazaridis put it – with backlogs of data building up in EMEA and overloading RIM’s systems in other regions.
“We are currently experiencing a BlackBerry service issue impacting some users in Europe, Middle East & Africa. All relevant support teams are working to resolve the issue. We apologize to any customers who may be affected,” RIM said in a statement on the current outage.
U.K. newspaper, The Telegraph, reported the outage as affecting only Vodafone customers — but the carrier was unable to confirm this.
Vodafone did confirm the outage started around 6AM (BST). It also provided the following statement: ”We are aware that some customers are experiencing problems using BlackBerry services such as email, internet and BBM in Europe, Middle East and Africa. RIM are working on fixing this as a priority and we are in regular communication with them. We expect updates shortly.”
After last year’s network blackout RIM said it would be performing “root cause analysis” to determine why its back-up didn’t perform as expected, and auditing its network infrastructure to find out why it took so long to recover.
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