Blackberry Users Lose BBM, Internet and Email Across Europe, Middle East, and Africa

A second day of outages plagues RIM customers, affecting areas in the Middle East, parts of Europe, and India. The initial server crash Monday morning at a data center just outside of London left millions of BlackBerry users across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa without BBM, Internet and email access. The outage occurred approximately 11:00 a.m. BST and still remains unresolved in many parts of the world.

RIM released a short statement Monday at 2:42 p.m. notifying customers of the issue and apologized. We are working to resolve an issue currently impacting some BlackBerry subscribers in Europe, Middle East and Africa, said BlackBerry UK. We're investigating, and we apologize to our customers for any inconvenience caused whilst this is resolved.

According to The Guardian, in July RIM claimed to have added 1 million subscribers in the Europe-Middle East-Africa (EMEA) region in less than a month. The rapidly growing enterprise customer base outside of the U.S. has been a feather in RIM's cap during a time when user numbers have been falling within North America.

The protracted outage could severely hurt RIM's chances of maintaining that base going forward. In the same article, one former RIM employee told The Guardian that the mobile company had not begun to address scalability issues until 2007, when it already had 8 million active devices. The strain being placed on RIM's servers is leading to speculation that the crash is a symptom of the company's overworked system as businesses reliant on RIM devices anxiously await resolution of the problem.