BlackBerry service restored in Europe, Middle East, Africa as new iPhone debuts
Posted Sep 21, 2012 11:47:34 AM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Research In Motion’s chief executive is apologizing to customers for a BlackBerry outage that hit users in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Thorsten Heins says no data or messages were lost in the outage, which lasted up to three hours for some BlackBerry users in those regions.
He says up to six per cent of BlackBerry users may have been hit by the problem, and that service has been fully restored.
No reason was given for the outage, but Heins says the company is “conducting a full technical analysis” and will report its finding as soon as it’s done.
The Waterloo, Ont.-based company announced the problem in postings on Facebook and Twitter before the business day got fully under way in North America.
The latest in a series of missteps for what has been Canada’s flagship technology company resulted in another drop in its stock price — which has already fallen dramatically since the company’s heyday a few years ago.
The shares (TSX:RIM) fell more than five per cent and as low as $6.36 in Toronto, coming within a few cents of a 52-week low of $6.24 set on Sept. 6.
The shares have taken a beating as RIM’s product lineup falls behind rival products, particularly the iPhones from Apple and Galaxy devices from Samsung.
“I want to apologize to those BlackBerry customers in Europe and Africa who experienced an impact in their quality of service earlier this morning,” Heins said in a statement.
“The BlackBerry service is now fully restored and I can report that no data or messages were lost.”
The RIM outage also brought up unpleasant memories of troubles with emails and chat messages last year that left users bereft for three days.
In Canada and the United States, last year’s October outage was shorter, but many of the world’s 70 million BlackBerry users were affected.
The timing could not have been worse as the new iPhone 5 went on sale, putting competitive pressure on BlackBerry.
RIM has already lost significant market share due to delays in bringing out its new generation of BlackBerry smartphones to compete with iPhones and smartphones using Google’s Android operating system.
