It was reported yesterday that BlackBerry users in Europe, Middle East and Africa encountered problems as their devices have no internet connection and cannot send or receive e-mail as well use the popular BlackBerry Messenger.  RIM officials did not offer insight as to what caused the problem but assured customers that they are doing everything they can to fix it.

The issue started Monday morning and was reported that service has been fully restored by 5:50 AM BST on Tuesday.  Some users reported that their service was restored as early as 8 PM on Monday, soon after they began to receive a rush of e-mails that were stacked up during the downtime.  RIM officials issued this statement:

“Yesterday, some BlackBerry subscribers in the EMEA region experienced delays with BlackBerry services,” RIM said. “The issue was resolved and services are operating normally. We apologise to those customers who were impacted for any inconvenience.  The immediate priority is always to return service to normal operation. Once service has returned and is stable, the teams then begin investigating the cause of the issue, which can take several days.”

Aside from informing customers that their service is back and apologizing to BlackBerry users, no explanation was offered regarding what caused the incident in the first place.  This wasn’t the first time they experienced this problem, as the same thing happened back in 2009, thought the service interruption only lasted a few hours.

A former RIM employee stated that RIM is neglecting the maintenance and up-gradation of its server architecture in its efforts to stay afloat in an increasingly competitive smartphone market.

In an interview with BBC News, Chris Green, a technology analyst with the Davies Murphy Group, stated that the problem was mainly about internet services and was probably caused by a breakdown in communication between RIM’s base in Canada and RIM’s Slough datacenter in West London.

Green also stated that the incident is “hugely embarrassing, it’s not the first time this has happened… With everything else that’s going on at the moment, decline in sales, the lackluster performance of the PlayBook tablet,” the incident is really an embarrassing public failure for the company and could eventually cause their downfall.