An outage at Research in Motion has left tens of millions of BlackBerry users in Africa, Europe and the Middle East without the ability to send or receive emails and messages through their devices, according to a report.
RIM suffered an outage at its server systems in Slough, Berkshire, England, the Guardian reported.
Canada-based RIM has acknowledged the outage and apologized to customers for any inconvenience it may cause while the company works to resolve the matter. The cause of the outage hasn't been announced.
It's just the latest in a series of negative publicity for RIM over the last several months.
But in a positive development Monday, RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie announced a feature that will allow BlackBerry smartphone users to connect with one another and share contact information, documents, URLs, photos and other multimedia content by tapping their phones together. The feature, BlackBerry Tag, will be incorporated in the next BlackBerry 7 OS update. The feature also will enable friends to instantly add each other as contacts on BlackBerry Messenger.
Shares of RIM were up 22 cents, or 0.94 percent on the NASDAQ as of 1:18 p.m. ET.
