BlackBerry Service Crashes in Europe

Article first published as BlackBerry Service Crashes in Europe on Technorati.

BlackBerry Service Crashes in Europe

Customers of BlackBerry service in Europe are cut off from web access, e-mail and instant messaging.

The outage occurred at about 11am BST on Monday and was still affecting users after 4 hours. There was no time given for when it was expected to be resolved. No technical details were given publicly by Blackberry.

Although Blackberry has been building up its user base, the outage is a huge failure for Blackberry and will affect it dramatically. Last month there was a major BlackBerry outage in Canada and parts of Latin America. The U.K. and U.S. had to suffer from at least two outages in the past year.

Customers were complaining by using Twitter. The #BlackBerry was used so much it’s trending on twitter now. 

The cause of the outage is unknown but a former RIM employee has told the guardian that RIM was ignoring problems with its architecture for years. The growing user base will have put serious traffic on the servers and probably caused for them to crash. 

Vodafone customer services were advising the users to reboot their mobile phone: Take out your battery and SIM without first turning off your phone, put the battery back into your device without the SIM, and then turn on. Then put the SIM back in.

In a statement, RIM said: "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."

Now email services are restored but RIM warned of continuing delays with some services.