Blackberry users across Europe, Middle East and Africa seems to have had their data services disrupted from around midday EA time. The data outage cut off BlackBerry services like email, web and instant messaging. Carriers in UK, Kuwait and Kenya reported the problem with users taking their grievances to the social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to complain.
Most carriers blamed Research In Motion (RIM) for the problem. RIM later confirmed the problem in a short statement.
“We are working to resolve an issue currently impacting some BlackBerry subscribers in Europe, Middle East and Africa,” RIM said. “We’re investigating, and we apologise to our customers for any inconvenience caused whilst this is resolved.”
The Blackberry Internet Service (BIS) – Blackberry Messenger (BBM), email and web services – was affected, according to customer postings on Twitter and in official BlackBerry forum. It is estimated that more than 50% of the BlackBerry’s 70 Million global users were affected.
RIM did has not clarified whether corporate customers on BlackBerry Enterprise Services had been hit.
Kenyan services provider Safaricom, Vodafone Egypt , Kuwait’s Wataniya and T-Mobile UK were among carriers which reported the outage to its clients.
The service is expected to be fully back up by midnight tonight (EA time).
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