RIM Suffers Outages in Europe, Africa and Middle East

Do the hits ever stop coming for Canadian smartphone maker RIM? It seems that for the last three years the company has been working hard to try and pull itself out of a tailspin and every time the Blackberry maker starts to level off, another piece of bad news starts the spin all over again. The newest bit of bad news came in the form of a massive Blackberry outage that affected users in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Research in Motion (RIM) released statements on its Facebook and Twitter accounts saying that the problem has now been resolved but that the affected regions did have outages that lasted a couple of hours. This news comes on the same day that one of RIM’s chief competitors in Apple has officially released their newest version of the iPhone. The iPhone 5 will no doubt continue to push Apple well ahead of RIM when it comes to popularity despite the company’s best efforts to drum up excitement and support for Blackberry 10.


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The problem is that this is hardly the first large outage the company has had to endure and every time RIM’s servers stop delivering text messages and e-mails, the company gets another black mark on a record that has seen a change in leadership and a score of layoffs.

"It's the worst timing," industry analyst Peter Misek said. "This is bad publicity and it's very unfortunate. But frankly the attention is all going to be on Apple today, all the weekend and frankly until the end of the year. Frankly, it's kind of irrelevant. The only thing that's relevant is when they are going to come out with their new phones."

While the Blackberry 10 is expected to finally be released early next year, the company is also trying to make hay as a provider of enterprise level services such as their new Mobile Device Management solution. Certainly having to talk about bad news on the same day in which Apple has looked especially triumphant isn’t what anyone at RIM wanted or needed. That being said, the company can leave the bad feelings behind if the Blackberry 10 can live up expectations.

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