Massive Blackberry Outage Hits Europe

Millions of Blackberry users across Europe have been unable to access their e-mail, instant messages or the Internet today in an outage that has lasted at least six hours. Research in Motion, which makes the Blackberry handsets and maintains the e-mail network supporting the devices, has acknowledged the outage and apologized to customers, but provided few details about the cause of the outage of when it might end.

"Our sincere apologies to all of you affected by today's BlackBerry service issues," RIM tweeted at 3:45 pm Eastern. "Some users in EMEA are experiencing issues."

There were reports in several media outlets that the problems in the EMEA region (Europe, Middle East and Africa) had been traced to a problem in a RIM data center in Slough in the UK.