BlackBerry problems hit four continents

LONDON, (Reuters) – Disruptions to BlackBerry  services spread to Latin America today, more than a day  after users in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and India  suffered extended outages.
BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd, which is  losing share of the corporate email market it once took for  granted, said it was working on the problem but gave no details  of the cause.
“Some users in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA),  India, Brazil, Chile, and Argentina are experiencing messaging  and browsing delays. We are working to restore normal service as  quickly as possible,” it said in a statement.
“We apologise for any inconvenience this has caused,” said  RIM, which earlier on Tuesday said it had resolved problems  disrupting its services in EMEA.
RIM is already facing calls from some investors for a  break-up, sale or change of management following dismal recent  results and a lacklustre reception of its PlayBook tablet  computer, designed to challenge Apple Inc’s iPad.
Its previous dominance of the corporate email market, in  which it locked organisations into its proprietary, secure  servers, is being challenged by other smartphone makers led by  the Apple iPhone.
“The current situation with the BlackBerry outages couldn’t  come at a worse time for RIM, following some harsh criticism in  recent months,” Informa Telecoms & Media analyst Malik Saadi  said in a statement.
“Some businesses may see this as a good reason to  re-evaluate their reliance on centralised servers and instead  look to investing in more corporately controlled servers.
“Not only would this enable IT departments to minimise the  risk of unforeseen collapses, but it could also give employees  more flexibility to use their own devices.”
Network operators and users in EMEA tweeted that email and  BlackBerry Messenger services were not working from around 1100  GMT. Reuters correspondents also reported problems with email  and instant messenger services.
Network operator T-Mobile <DTEGn.DE> said on its website  that the problems were due to a European-wide outage on the  Blackberry network.
It said: “RIM has apologised for the interruption to  services and said it’s working to restore normal operations.”
Earlier, RIM said it had restored BlackBerry services in the  region, some 20 hours after users in EMEA and India first  reported problems with email and BlackBerry Messenger.