If you’re RIM, the worst way to endear yourself with customers is to screw up their service around the world. Unfortunately, they’ve done just that, nuking BBM, email and web access throughout Europe, Africa and Asia.
Carriers are all blaming a glitch on RIM’s side, The Telegraph in the UK reports, possibly a data centre collapse in Slough, UK. One Kuwaiti telecom tweeted the following: “BlackBerry Fans, the BlackBerry Server is temporarily down. It’ll be up & running soon. We apologise on behalf of RIM for any inconvenience.” How will we check the BlackBerry App World now? [Telegraph]
Update: RIM UK has finally acknowledged the outage, tweeting that they’re “investigating” the blackout.
Update 2: English Giz reader Govi just emailed in the following:
BB has been down since around 10.15am on my side. This morning at 9am I sent a friend a message I’m switching to an iphone, to which he replied ‘why would you do that’. I think RIM just answered his question.
Update 3: South African Gizmodo pal Alexis chimes in: “Yep South Africa has been out since this morning. Email is still working strangely enough, but no IM, or browsing.”
Update 4: From London:
Yes my business partner and I both have Blackberry phones.
We run a small plumbing and heating company in South East London and are definitely affected!
I’ve got screaming customers trying to get hold of us and urgent jobs to attend to but without the service of our blackberry we are unable to get hold of each other. This is really frustrating and a nuisance to our business.
Update 5: South America, too? “Here in Chile we have been without BB service for over eight hours now,” shares a Giz reader below the equator.
Are you a BlackBerry user affected by the outage? Let us know in the comments below.
Photo: DESmith Photography/Shutterstock
Ajmay
Tuesday, October 11, 2011 at 6:53 AMReally? They still work as phones right? I’m pretty sure they just uses the plain old cellular network for calls.
conradcpt
Tuesday, October 11, 2011 at 8:11 AMYes, that’s what I thought! They’re just loosing business because they’re too lazy or cheap to actually call a customer like we’ve been doing before BlackBerry!
Really guys! Grow up! And “customers of your lousy phones”? Really giz? Pathetic!
mariam from TUNIS
Tuesday, October 11, 2011 at 8:39 AMIts sad, that at 9am, my BB was working.. jsut about noon till now which is about 11 hours, its not working. Please RIM kindly tell us what the problem is or provide solution ASAP…plsss
James Thomas
Tuesday, October 11, 2011 at 8:54 AM“I’ve got screaming customers trying to get hold of us and urgent jobs to attend to but without the service of our blackberry we are unable to get hold of each other. This is really frustrating and a nuisance to our business.”
A business without a land line? Also, how do you know that your customers are screaming without somehow being in contact with them? Or were they screaming before the outage? If so, how is that Blackberry’s fault?
edu
Tuesday, October 11, 2011 at 9:00 AMi’d thought that my BB hand held was the problem and even had to pay someone to take it to the service centre. guess what the service centre guys just wiped off all data on the phone including all the BB applications. if only this info had come to me earlier. i really do feel bad!
Tucky
Tuesday, October 11, 2011 at 10:04 AMRIM still exist? I thought they would have gone the way of Elvis Presley by now.
Bill S. Preston Esq.
Tuesday, October 11, 2011 at 2:13 PMLOL BB!
lolwut
Tuesday, October 11, 2011 at 2:47 PMIn Indonesia, most blackberry users is ordinary people, where the combined cost of owning one and the monthly credit is bloody cheap compared to ordinary phones.
I’ve been telling most of them that BB service is too centralized, I guess they’ll listen now.
hahaha
A. Faiq
Tuesday, October 11, 2011 at 8:49 PMSteve jobs went ta heaven and turned off the bb service :P
Phoenix
Tuesday, October 11, 2011 at 11:21 PMIm in the uk and about 2 hours ago my service also dropped off the face of the earth again. Wish RIM would sort it out as if it happens a third day i will be talking to my provider about changing my contract as i wont pay for services i cant use.