BlackBerry services back

BlackBerry maker Research in Motion’s woes seem to be mounting after it reported a net loss of $518 million last week. On Saturday and Sunday, some users in the UAE reported glitches, which the company said had been fixed. The services were affected from Saturday evening, and involved the popular BB messenger and e-mail. Some subscribers also noticed messages sent to contacts were crawling and the devices froze. “It took a while to receive messages on my phone until this morning. The problem seems to have been sorted out now,” said Ali Hassan. Sandeep Saihgal, Managing Director, RIM Middle East, said: “Yesterday (Saturday), we experienced a service issue which may have affected some of our customers in certain parts of Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Some minor issues relating to browsing and BlackBerry Messenger may still persist, but all other services are operating as normal. We apologise to any customers in these regions who may have been inconvenienced.” Telecom provider du confirmed that services have returned to normal. ‘‘The services degradation lasted from 4.38pm on June 30 to 1.10am, July 1,’’ it said in a statement. On Saturday, du had said the problems were due to ‘technical challenges’ faced by RIM. “We would like to inform our BlackBerry users that they might have experienced degradation in their BlackBerry services due to technical challenges as reported by RIM, the manufacturer of BlackBerry,” it said. It had said ‘degradation’ might include delays in sending or receiving messages or using other services such as BlackBerry Messenger. Customers were also unable to create new accounts, add (integrate) third-party email accounts, or use BlackBerry subscriber web sites. “BlackBerry Enterprise Servers may be unable to connect to the BlackBerry Infrastructure. Wireless service providers and device resellers may experience delays in using BlackBerry administration websites, creating subscriber accounts, or provisioning services for subscribers.” The Canadian company’s sales plunged in the quarter ending June 2 to $2.8 billion, compared to $4.9 billion in the same period last year. It has decided to delay the launch of its next-generation BlackBerry 10 devices to early next year. The firm plans to save $1 billion in costs by shedding 5,000 jobs from its 16,500 workforce worldwide over the next nine months. BB services in the UAE were earlier interrupted in October 2011.