RIM Users Suffer Second Day Of Outages

RIM BlackBerry PlayBook Teardown

Research In Motion acknowledged Tuesday that its BlackBerry service is experiencing more difficulties in Asian, African, and European markets. The disruption is affecting tens of millions of users, who are unable to access their email or use the BlackBerry Messenger service.

The first problem occurred Monday morning, leaving BlackBerry users without service for much of the day. Service was eventually restored Monday evening.

On Tuesday morning, BlackBerry users woke up to find the service down again. The service is down across much of Europe, parts of Africa, Asia, as well as Argentina, Brazil, and Chili in South America.

"Some users in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), India, Brazil, Chile, and Argentina are experiencing messaging and browsing delays. We are working to restore normal service as quickly as possible," the company said in a statement. "We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused."

The issue is under investigation and appears to stem from a U.K.-based hub that RIM operates. The network operations center (NOC) in question controls traffic for the affected countries. Research In Motion said that it hopes to have the problem resolved (again) by 11 a.m. British Standard Time Wednesday morning.

[ It has been a rough year for RIM. Read RIM Reports Falling Revenue, Profits. ]

With no service, mobile employees will have to find other ways to connect to their email, calendar, contacts, and colleagues. It could be a significant disruption to the daily lives of mobile professionals in the affected countries. It is such times that serve as a reminder that IT departments would do well to have a back-up plan in place.

"The current situation with the BlackBerry outages couldn't come at a worse time for RIM, following some harsh criticism in recent months," said Informa Telecoms & Media analyst Malik Saadi said in a statement provided to media. "Some businesses may see this as a good reason to re-evaluate their reliance on centralized servers and instead look to investing in more corporately controlled servers. Not only would this enable IT departments to minimize the risk of unforeseen collapses, but it could also give employees more flexibility to use their own devices."

RIM has lost ground in markets around the world to Google's Android platform and Apple's iPhone. The company has not responded well to competitive threats, and has seen a loss of customers in its key category: business users.

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