Research in Motion admits BlackBerry services down in latest network outage

Research in Motion (RIM) is suffering another embarrassing outage on its network as corporate account customers are left cut off from services on its BlackBerry devices.

Writing on its Twitter account, the BlackBerry UK team admitted the issues was affecting customers across a wider region, but gave no indication as to what the problem was or how many people it was affecting.

Some users in Europe, Middle East & Africa are experiencing issues with their BlackBerry service.

— BlackBerry UK (@UK_BlackBerry) September 21, 2012

"We are investigating and apologise for any inconvenience."

When contacted by V3 for more information RIM merely reiterated this statement.

The issue, which started at around 6am, appears to only be affecting Vodafone users in the UK.

An accounts manager at the firm admitted the issue was affecting its customers, although laid the blame squarely with RIM.

"As far as we can tell all Blackberry services have gone down. This is a RIM issue and is affecting all devices across all networks," they said.

Vodafone added that issue was affecting all key data services used by BlackBerry customers, although voice and text services remain online.

"We are aware that some customers are experiencing problems using BlackBerry services such as email, internet and BBM," it said.

"RIM are working on fixing this as a priority and we are in regular communication with them. We expect updates shortly."

BlackBerry corporate customers confirmed to V3 they had also been informed of the issue by Vodafone.

One company told V3 they had been informed by Vodafone that RIM expected to have the issue fixed within two or three hours.

Neither Vodafone nor RIM confirmed this information when contacted for comment.

So far it's not clear if the issues is only affecting Vodafone customers. O2 said they were not aware of any problems but were keeping an eye on the situation.

"We're aware of the situation RIM are experiencing but currently our customers don't appear to have any issues with their BlackBerry services on O2," a spokesperson said.

EE had not replied when contacted for comment by V3 as to whether the issue was affecting their customers.

The incident is an embarrassing echo of a similar even from last year in which customers around the world were left cut off from services for several days, forcing the firm to apologise profusely.