BlackBerry users in Europe, the Middle East and Africa have been unable to access email, web and messaging services for last the past four hours.
Users have been reporting a lack of service from around 11am. A spokesperson for BlackBerry maker Research in Motion (RIM) acknowledged the outage, but the company has yet to issue an explanation.
According to a recent job posting on the RIM website, BlackBerry services for the Europe, Middle East and Africa region are all hosted in a data centre in Slough.
Telcos from around the region haved acknowledged the outage, and were quick to point fingers at RIM.
UK telco T-Mobile’s official Twitter account reported that "there is an issue with Blackberry services at present. RIM are investigating this".
Vodafone Egypt said that "BlackBerry service is currently down from RIM’s side, affecting Egypt and other countries in the region".
Bahraini operator Batelco said "the issue with BlackBerry service is effecting all of #Bahrain, and it is dealt with by BlackBerry providers in Canada".
And Kuwaiti telco Wataniya reported that "the BlackBerry Server is temporarily down. It’ll be up & running soon. We apologise on behalf of RIM for any inconvenience."
Such an outage is particularly damaging for RIM, which makes much of its reputation for security and reliability when pitching to the business market.
