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BlackBerry service down again in Europe, Middle East, Africa: Twice in two days

Research in Motion is suffering from another service outage and users are going to Twitter to vent their frustrations.
Written by Zack Whittaker, Contributor

Research in Motion issued a statement that BlackBerry services were "operating normally" after a service crash affected users across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, but many customers are still seeing downtime.

Update: In a statement addressing today's issues, Research in Motion said:

"Some users in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, India, Brazil, Chile, and Argentina are experiencing messaging and browsing delays.  We are working to restore normal service as quickly as possible.  We apologise for any inconvenience this has caused."

BlackBerry users are flooding microblogging site Twitter with comments of anger, frustration and outright fury, after another service failure seems to have brought all data services for BlackBerry consumer handsets.

Users across Europe are complaining that data is not flowing to or from their devices, with network dependent operations like text messaging and multimedia messaging still working.

ZDNet colleagues have also reported difficulties with the BlackBerry service.

Research in Motion, the BlackBerry maker which maintains the BlackBerry infrastructure, enables data services such as email, browsing and applications to function.

Users across Europe, the Middle East and Africa -- from Spain, Belgium, France, Germany and as far away as South Africa -- say that the BlackBerry service is down.

T-Mobile UK tweeted that there was another outage with the BlackBerry service, and that "BlackBerry are currently investigating this."

With less than 24 hours since the last outage, Research in Motion offered no explanation as to why the network failed. Sources had said that a datacenter in Slough, near London, had failed due to a service outage.

Some customers of the Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) also suffered downtime, Microsoft tweeted yesterday. BPOS, though not accepting new customers in favour of the new Office 365 suite of products, uses BlackBerry back-end to support business users. Because the BlackBerry service is hosted, some Microsoft users also suffered during the outage.

The Slough-based datacenter, which provides BlackBerry online services, went down around 11am GMT yesterday morning and took nearly the full day to restore services. By the evening, the backlog of email queued for delivery started to appear on BlackBerry handsets.

Research in Motion "could not confirm the outage", but will make a statement as and when they have any more information through.

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