BlackBerry Network Still Down - 10/11/2011

As originally reported yesterday, BlackBerry users have been hit hard by an outage that initially affected Europe, Middle East and Africa.

We have received hundreds of reports from unhappy BlackBerry users who were unable to use BBM, email accounts, Internet, or any other application that requires data connection, including Facebook, Twitter and App World.

Research in Motion stated that the problem only affects EMEA countries, it appears that the outage spread and is now affecting both Americas, as well.

Fortunately, it appears that the services are coming back up in some regions, as some users already reported full restoration of BlackBerry services.

At 6AM UTC BlackBerry services were fully restored in Romania (Orange), Netherlands, and UK (partially).

Unfortunately, the network is still down for BlackBerry owners in Canada, Africa and Middle East. Additionally, outage reports have started to come in from US-based users as well at around 2AM UTC on Oct 11th.

It's been 24 hours since the first reports about the outage came in and RIM has yet to make any official statements regarding the issues that are now affecting its users at a global scale.

If you're affected, let us know in the comments and make sure you state your location.

UPDATE: UK is still struggling, as BB services in London have not been fully restored yet; emails and BBM work sporadically and only for receiving. Germany continues to be in the dark completely, however.

UPDATE 2: BlackBerry owners in South Africa are seeing services being fully restored.

UPDATE 3: I have reached out to all RIM media contacts for an official statement and will update everyone as soon as one is provided.

UPDATE 4: Just received a reply from RIM's EMEA PR: "Yesterday, some BlackBerry subscribers in the EMEA region experienced delays with BlackBerry services. The issue was resolved and services are operating normally. We apologize to those customers who were impacted for any inconvenience". That doesn't seem to be the case, however, based on reports we've been receiving from users.

UPDATE 5: Starting 9:15 AM UTC, several members of our team have noticed BBM and email delays (Orange Romania). Wondering if these delays and recent US outage reports could mean that RIM has moved all customers to the US infrastructure while it struggles to fix its EMEA network. 

UPDATE 6: 11:00 AM UTC - outages are starting to return to most territories that were restored over the last few hours. Reports have come from South Africa, the UK, Portugal, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands and we've noticed it at Orange Romania as well.

UPDATE 7: 11:50 AM UTC - downtime recurrence reports start coming from the Middle East (Qatar) and Africa (Nigeria).

UPDATE 8: 12:30 AM UTC - BIS now affected in Greece as well.

UPDATE 9: 1:50 PM UTC - outage reports coming from India, Egypt, Dubai and Italy.

UPDATE 10: It appears that Turkey never recovered since yesterday's outage

UPDATE 11: Users in Spain and Switzerland report BB services are down for them as well.

UPDATE 12: BlackBerry owners in Romania using Orange's network are receiving apology text messages. Translation: "We apologize if the BlackBerry service is temporarily unavailable. The service provider - RIM - will resolve the issue as soon as possible." (original SMS screenshot in the attached gallery)

UPDATE 13: We've received a follow-up from RIM's PR: "Some users in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, India, Brazil, Chile, and Argentina are experiencing messaging and browsing delays.  We are working to restore normal service as quickly as possible.  We apologise for any inconvenience this has caused."  Again, this doesn't seem to be entirely correct, since we're getting outage reports from other territories  as well.

UPDATE 14: BB services have started again to go up and back down intermittently. For some users, certain services work while others have long delays or are unavailable completely.

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