BlackBerry services return with no outage explanation

A serious data service outage that hit RIM's BlackBerry systems across Europe, the Middle East and Africa has been resolved, although the company is yet to explain the downtime.

The outage, which affected the use of email, the internet and instant messaging, began on Monday morning and was over by — at the latest — 5:50am BST on Tuesday. It was at this time that RIM issued a statement apologising for the issue, and saying things were back to normal.

"Yesterday, some BlackBerry subscribers in the EMEA region experienced delays with BlackBerry services," RIM said. "The issue was resolved and services are operating normally. We apologise to those customers who were impacted for any inconvenience."

Some users in the UK used BlackBerry forums to report that services were back up and running as early as 8:00pm on Monday, at which point "a pile of emails" suddenly appeared after stacking up during the downtime.

RIM said that it did not typically get information about the cause of service issues right away.

"The immediate priority is always to return service to normal operation. Once service has returned and is stable, the teams then begin investigating the cause of the issue, which can take several days," the company said.

According to the BBC, the problem was likely caused by server problems at RIM's Slough datacentre, and only affected the BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS), not BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES).