RIM’s BlackBerry 10 launch may only be a matter of weeks away, but those that are connected to the company’s BlackBerry Internet Services (BIS) across Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) are experiencing yet another outage as a result of technical issues on Vodafone networks.
The company alerted users in the UK via its BlackBerry_UK Twitter account, posting: “Vodafone service issues are impacting some BlackBerry customers in Europe, Middle East & Africa. We are supporting their efforts to resolve.”
It is believed that a network fault between Vodafone and RIM is the cause, locking users out from their emails, BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) and other BlackBerry services.
It’s not the first time the all-important service has gone down in recent months. In September, RIM revealed that its BlackBerry messaging service and Enterprise servers were experiencing issues and had become unresponsive across the very same regions, on the very same day the iPhone 5 launched around the world.
While it is not believed that the issue is anything like the outage RIM experienced back in October 2011 — where services were down for a number of days and resulted in the company offer free app downloads as a form of compensation — the company will need to act quick to ensure it doesn’t give additional reasons for customers to jump to rivals smartphones ahead of its BlackBerry 10 launch on January 30.
We have contacted Vodafone for comment on the outage and will update should we receive a response.
Update: Vodafone has issued a statement on the matter, saying that it is working closely with RIM to fix the issue:
“We are aware that some BlackBerry customers are experiencing issues. Vodafone is working closely with Research in Motion (RIM) to restore full service as soon as possible. As soon as we have further information we will provide further updates.”
Incidentally, we are receiving reports that both companies have started to bring services back online.
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