An estimated three to four million Blackberry users across India were also affected by a near blackout in the internet and messaging services across Asia and Europe late on Monday.
“Blackberry services are currently unavailable across Asia, Middle East and Europe. This may lead to intermittent issues while using Blackberry services. Our Blackberry service partner RIM is working on the issue. The services are likely to be restored within the next four hours,” a message sent by Airtel to all their Blackberry subscribers at around 1 am early Tuesday morning said.
The services went down intermittently at around 3:30 pm and were restored by around 2:30 am early Tuesday morning. “There a problem with the RIM server,” a senior executive with Airtel said. The extent of the outage wasn’t clear as some Blackberry Enterprise Server subscribers were still able to access their services till around 8:00 pm in the evening.
“We are working to resolve an issue currently impacting some BlackBerry subscribers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa and India. We’re investigating, and we apologize to our customers for any inconvenience caused whilst this is resolved,” Canada-based RIM said in a statement.
Telecom operators in India maintained that there was no problem at their end. Glitches in BlackBerry services were reported from different parts of the world.
“Millions of BlackBerry smartphone users have been cut off by a major fault at RIM, the Canadian company that makes the devices,” UK’s Daily Telegraph said in a report. Hundreds of users flooded microblogging site Twitter, complaining about disruptions in BlackBerry services.