RIM investigates service delay reports

Research In Motion said on Wednesday that it was investigating reports of delays in its BlackBerry services, although it subsequently said everything was operating normally.

RIM first addressed the situation in a tweet that promised an update "ASAP". That update came three hours later, reading: "BlackBerry services are currently operating normally in EMEIA [Europe, Middle East, India and Africa]".

The BlackBerry service update page did not, at the time of writing this blog, indicate any problems.

The delay reports came almost a month after RIM suffered a nightmarish three-day outage that began with a core switch failure in the UK and went on to affect BlackBerry email, messaging and browsing services around the world. RIM ended up facing aclass action lawsuit from outraged Canadians, and had to compensate customers with free apps.

The swiftness of RIM's response to the delay reports on Wednesday stood in stark contrast to the company's apparently sluggish reaction when the October downtime occurred.

Although RIM employees were scrambling to identify and fix the problem during that outage, the Canadian firm took flak for not keeping the rest of the world updated as to what was going on.