RIM suffers Blackberry outage on Iphone 5 launch day

RESEARCH IN MOTION (RIM) has suffered a major Blackberry outage across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, a failure that could see more users shifting to its competitors.

The badly timed failure lands on the morning of Apple's Iphone 5 launch, and has reportedly left thousands of Blackberry users without access to their email or Blackberry Messenger (BBM). A few of us here at The INQUIRER have fallen victim to the Blackberry outage, and it seems to be affecting users across all UK mobile operators.

A Blackberry spokesperson told The INQUIRER, "We are currently experiencing a BlackBerry service issue impacting some users in Europe, Middle East and Africa. All relevant support teams are working to resolve the issue. We apologize to any customers who may be affected."

A Vodafone executive also confirmed the Blackberry outage, telling us, "We are aware that some customers are experiencing problems using BlackBerry services such as email, internet and BBM in Europe, Middle East and Africa.

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

This failure comes almost exactly a year after RIM's last high profile outage, which saw users left without access to Blackberry services for days.

Update
Research in Motion has confirmed that Blackberry services have now been restored. A spokesperson said, "Our apologies to any customers impacted by the Blackberry service issue today. We can confirm that services have been restored and are now operating normally." µ