Blackberry fail to update customers: 36 hours with problems

It has been a heck of a week for Research In Motion as they have been experienced some serious issues with their network, affecting millions of BlackBerry users across the globe.

Blackberry email has been causing problems now for 36 hours and the BBM service is unavailable in many areas. To make matters worse the company have failed to update their customer base, instead forcing them to rely on news sites such as the BBC to detail how widespread the problems really are.

Customers have been complaining to their network provider, only to be referred to Research In Motion directly. It was that bad that RIM issued a statement on their Twitter feed issuing an apology.

“Some users in EMEA are experiencing issues. We're investigating, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”

Even this message has came under attack as ‘joe public' won't have a clue what ‘EMEA' stands for, a point that writer Rory Cellan Jones reiterated on the BBC site. He said “EMEA? Where on earth is that? I know, because marketing speak floods my inbox every minute, that it stands for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, but many people will surely have been mystified.”

Apparently RIM claim that many of the problems are resolved now, but it doesn't help that the company are having to deal with many unhappy customers, some of which weren't even aware that Blackberry had direct control over some functionality of their handset. Many would assume that the mobile phone networks would be completely responsible.

Other reports indicate that the problems are still ongoing and interruptions have started again this morning for many locations. Nothing has been confirmed by RIM directly, but they have yet to make a very public statement regarding the issues, so people are left wondering when it might be completely resolved.

The last report said: RIM update: The messaging and browsing delays being experienced by BlackBerry users in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, India, Brazil, Chile and Argentina were caused by a core switch failure within RIM's infrastructure. Although the system is designed to failover to a back-up switch, the failover did not function as previously tested. As a result, a large backlog of data was generated and we are now working to clear that backlog and restore normal service as quickly as possible. We apologize for any inconvenience and we will continue to keep you informed.”

Kitguru says: 36 hours to get a semi detailed reason for the problems does not look good, especially to the punters who have paid a small fortune for the handset.

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