Research In Motion Ltd's (RIMM,RIM.TO) BlackBerry smartphone suffered an embarrassing outage across Europe, the Middle East and Africa with some customers unable to use services such as email, web-surfing and BlackBerry Messenger.
The outage coincides with the launch of Apple Inc.'s (AAPL) iPhone 5. While RIM has apologized and is investigating the issue, the cause of the outage is still not known.
The Canadian smartphone maker is already in an unenviable position, with dwindling sales and declining market share, thanks to competition from rivals such as Apple and Samsung.
While the issue was raised first by customers of Vodafone Plc. (VOD, VOD.L) around 8 AM, the operator apparently said the fault lay with the handset maker.
While some Vodafone customers are able to access their services, some others are having problem in getting these services over Wi-Fi or the mobile network. The service had suffered a four-day downtime last year.
Last week, Apple's iCloud experienced an outage for two days for certain customers. Early this year, Google's Gmail also faced a similar trouble.
RIMM, which closed at $6.9053 on Thursday, is losing 1.8 percent in pre-market trading.
RIM.TO closed at C$6.75 on Thursday, down from the prior close of C$7.03.
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