RIM (Research In Motion) has confirmed that its BlackBerry services have been restored across Europe following a three hour long outage. The outage which incidentally happened on the same day – archrival Apple launched its newest iPhone 5 model caused major embarrassment for the Canadian smartphone maker. RIM is already facing troubled times thanks to increased competition from iOS and Android platforms and this outage – the second in less than a years time couldn’t have come at a worse time for them.
The outage lasted for a good three hours and is estimated to have affected at least 5 million users – nearly 6 percent of its customer base. The CEO of RIM Thorsten Heins issued an apology to BlackBerry users.
“We are conducting a full technical analysis of this quality of service issue and will report as soon as it concludes. I again want to apologize to those customers who were impacted today.”, he was quoted in an email statement issued soon after the issue was reported.
Incidentally, RIM had also said something similar during its last major outage which happened back in October 2011. It has however not yet revealed as to what exactly had caused that issue. It was also pertinent to note that the previous outage also happened on the eve of an iPhone launch – the iPhone 4S back then! Mere co-incidence?!
The outage also happened at a time when the company was planning its transition from older BlackBerry OS versions to the promising OS 10 which it plans to launch in the months to come.
