BlackBerry confirms EMEA outages, restores services

Jeez, RIM can’t catch a break. The beleaguered Canadian manufacturer earlier today confirmed that the servers running its BBM messaging service and BES enterprise offering were experiencing issues and had become unresponsive.

The confirmation after people across the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region began noticing issues with the services. Rim acknowledged the issue on its UK Twitter feed, although the general sentiment on the social network seemed to suggest that it had been slow to respond:

Some users in Europe, Middle East & Africa are experiencing issues with their BlackBerry service.

— BlackBerry UK (@UK_BlackBerry) September 21, 2012

We are investigating and apologise for any inconvenience.

— BlackBerry UK (@UK_BlackBerry) September 21, 2012

According to CrackBerry, the services are now back up and the outage may have been due to planned maintenance.

A commenter on the article posted a response they had received from RIM much to that effect:

We are currently performing emergency maintenance on our infrastructure in the Europe region.

Subscribers may experience delays in sending or receiving messages or using other services such as BlackBerry Messenger. Subscribers may also be unable to create new accounts, add (integrate) third-party email accounts, or use BlackBerry subscriber web sites. BlackBerry Enterprise Servers may be unable to connect to the BlackBerry Infrastructure.

Services should be restored within 2 to 2.5 hours at the most.

We will keep you updated on the situation.

While the outage was nowhere near as severe as the global one it experienced in 2011, the timing could scarcely be worse. The iPhone 5 hits retail stores today in a number of countries. This latest outage could well be the final straw for a number of BlackBerry users. So if you’re in the queue for your shiny new iDevice, look out for a few lost-looking potential converts.

RIM has issued a statement aplogising for the outage and confirming that everything is back up and running:

Our apologies to any customers impacted by the BlackBerry service issue today. We can confirm that services have been restored and are now operating normally.

RIM CEO Thorsten Heins meanwhile sent a personal message of apology to all those affected:

I want to apologize to those BlackBerry customers in Europe and Africa who experienced an impact in their quality of service earlier this morning.The BlackBerry service is now fully restored and I can report that no data or messages were lost. Up to 6 percent of our user base may have been impacted. Preliminary analysis suggests that those customers may have experienced a maximum delay of 3 hours in the delivery and reception of their messages.We are conducting a full technical analysis of this quality of service issue and will report as soon as it concludes. I again want to apologize to those customers who were impacted today.