RIM BlackBerry users suffer service disruption in Europe

RIM BlackBerry users suffer service disruption in EuropeAlmost in coincidence with Apple's much-awaited launch of its iPhone 5 on Friday, September 21, some European users of Research In Motion (RIM)'s BlackBerry devices witnessed a service disruption --- the second service outage for RIM in the last two years.

While Vodafone Group revealed that the Friday service outage affected Blackberry subscribers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, where users lost e-mail and Internet access, RIM said in an email that the disruption did not affect the users in the company's biggest market - the US.

Extending an apology for the service outage and noting that the glitch had been fixed for resuming the service, Thorsten Heins - CEO of RIM - said in a message on the official RIM website that the disruption lasted for a maximum of three hours for some users.

Heins further added that the approximately 6 percent of the over 78 million subscribers of RIM BlackBerry devices had been affected by the service outage, the reason for which will be ascertained by the company after a comprehensive technical analysis.

With Heins also stating that the service had been "fully restored" and that "no data or messages were lost," Jefferies analyst Peter Misek said that though the timing of the RIM service outage was the "worst" possible - coinciding with the iPhone 5 release - and amounted to "bad publicity," the incident was "kind of irrelevant" as all the attention is presently being grabbed by Apple!