BlackBerry services back up after Vodafone outage
Research In Motion has restored service for those Vodafone customers affected by Friday's BlackBerry service outage.
The problem meant some users in Europe, the Middle East and Africa were unable to use email, web browsing or BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) functionality on the handsets.
Vodafone customers reportedly spotted the access problems mid-morning on Friday, though not all of the UK operator's BlackBerry users seemed to be affected.
"I want to apologise to those BlackBerry customers in Europe and Africa who experienced an impact in their quality of service earlier this morning. The BlackBerry service is now fully restored, and I can report that no data or messages were lost," Thorsten Heins, chief executive of RIM, said in a statement.
The public apology from the RIM chief is a marked departure from the way the company dealt with a similar outage on BlackBerry Internet Services a year ago, when it was criticised for a failure to communicate about the problem.
According to Heins, as many as six percent of BlackBerry customers in the region could have been unable to access RIM's services. The outage in sending or getting messages lasted a maximum of three hours, the company's early investigation indicates.
"We are conducting a full technical analysis of this quality of service issue and will report as soon as it concludes," Heins said.
However, he did not say whether Vodafone was at fault, as some users were told.