BlackBerry users were left with no access to their emails, the Internet or the BBM messaging service yesterday (Oct 10) after a serious malfunction at its parent company’s servers in Berkshire.

Research In Motion (RIM), a Canadian company, develops BlackBerry handsets and maintains infrastructure for Europe the Middle East and Africa from Slough in the UK. At around 15:30 British time yesterday, it announced that it was aware of connectivity issues across its EMEA regions and said it was working to solve the issues. The problems are thought to have started at 11am.

At midnight, around 13 hours after the problems started, after a series of Tweets that attested to ongoing investigations, the company updated to say that some users were still experiencing problems with browsing and instant messaging but that all email systems had been restored.  

Just before 6am this morning, the company gave an update to say that all problems had been solved.
A former RIM employee has told The Guardian newspaper that the problems may be caused by on-premise “clunky infrastructure” with no capacity to increase and decrease in computing power as needed in the way that modern cloud set ups allow.

"They didn't start looking at scalability until about 2007, when they had around 8m active devices," the newspaper was told. "The attitude was, 'We're going to grow and grow but making sure our infrastructure can support it isn't a priority.' They have their own clunky infrastructure to do something that you don't really need a clunky infrastructure to do anymore."

The Cloud Circle is attempting to substantiate these claims but RIM can thus far not be reached for comment.