Bad timing for RIM. As its main rival Apple got customers and channel partners excited over the launch of the iPhone 5, some Blackberry users Europe and North Africa got blacked out.
Research in Motion CEO Thorsten Heins said that as many as six per cent of BlackBerry users in those two regions were without service for about three hours this past Friday.
RIM released a statement of apology from Heins to these customers, while stating the service was up and running. The company also promised full technical support to those users impacted from the Friday blackout.
The silver lining in all of this was that no data or messages got lost, according to Heins.
This outage is not the first occurrence for the Waterloo, Ont.-based company. RIM had a much publicized outage in North America a few years ago that lasted more than two days.