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