Thought your BlackBerry woes were over? Guess again. Just hours after RIM fixed a day long data outage, fresh reports are in that the BlackBerry messaging system has toppled over again. It’s a major fail for RIM, but doubtless good news indeed for Apple, which launches iMessage, its answer to BBM, tomorrow.
BlackBerry owners from across the world have taken to Twitter to complain about a fresh bout of slow to no service on their BlackBerrys, just hours after RIM resolved a 20 hour service outage caused by server problems in its Slough data centre.
A BlackBerry spokesperson issued the following statement on Twitter: “We apologize to any of our customers in Europe, Middle East & Africa still experiencing issues. We’ll bring you an update as soon as we can.”
The crash couldn’t come at a more awkward time for RIM. The Canadian company has seen a drastic decline in smartphone market share in recent months and its BlackBerry PlayBook tablet has proved a critical failure.
To cap it off, Apple is launching iOS 5 for iPhones, iPod touches and iPad tomorrow, with a new instant messaging service, iMessage, which allows iOS users to chat in a similar way to BlackBerry Messenger.
A group messaging service relies on numbers for critical mass, and until now, only RIM has had enough users to pull it off on one platform alone. Now Apple is trying its hand at it, things could soon change.
Is this the first RIM death rattle? Just a teething trouble that won’t have you defecting? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
(via BGR)
