BlackBerry services restored

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UPDATE: Research in Motion, the Canadian company behind the Blackberry devices, has said that yesterday’s service outage has been rectified, though some users may experience delays as blacklogs are cleared.

The Twitter account for BlackBerry support confirmed that the problems were seen across the EMEA region.

"@BlackBerryHelp: Some users in EMEA are experiencing issues. We’re investigating, and we apologise for any inconvenience."

In a short statement, the company did not specify what the issue was.

"Some customers may continue to experience delays with instant messaging and browsing services and our technical teams are working to return services to normal operation as quickly as possible."

BlackBerry customers on various networks across the UK and Ireland are suffering an extensive data outage, cutting them off from e-mail, instant messaging and web access. The Telegraph in the UK is going so far as to report it as a Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) outage.

The outage began for some customers before 10am this morning, with Vodafone UK customer services saying they had the problem confirmed by BlackBerry maker RIM at about 11.30 this morning. No technical details about the outage are publicly available.

One Irish Blackberry user on the Vodafone network reported very slow updating as opposed to complete service loss.

Vodafone Ireland’s Twitter support account said "confirmed issue with RIM in ROI and UK. No estimated time of fix as yet."

Unhappy BlackBerry customers have flooded the Twitter social networking site with their complaints about the outage, with #BlackBerry now trending on the site as a result.

Vodafone UK customer services said they believed the outage was affecting "80% of UK BlackBerry users on all mobile networks, not just Vodafone’s".
 
This has not been confirmed by RIM, whose spokeswoman in the UK had no official comment to make on the problem as of 13:30 – about 3.5 hours after the problem started for many.

The spokeswoman said an official statement would be made later today. The main Canada-based BlackBerry customer services Twitter account (@BlackBerryHelp) was oblivious to the outage. A posting at around 13:00 UK time said: "Hey #teamblackberry happy Monday everyone! Hope you all had a great weekend we are back to answer your questions stay tuned for answers."
 
There was a major BlackBerry outage in Canada and parts of Latin America last month, and the UK suffered at least two BlackBerry outages last year.
 
Vodafone customer services were advising customers to take the following action to reboot their phones later this afternoon, if it appeared the BlackBerry service had not automatically resumed on their devices:
 
"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. If Vodafone data services were then not found, try and connect to another rival network manually (which wouldn’t be successful), and then try and manually select Vodafone data services again."

IDG News Services and TechCentral Reporters

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