Blackberry services down in Europe, Middle East and Africa

Millions of Blackberry owners across Europe, the Middle East and Africa have been left without services following a server crash. Owners of the smartphones were unable to browse the web, send email or instant messages, according to the BBC. The problem appears to have originated in a data centre in Slough which handles Blackberry services for the affected regions. Blackberry UK said it knew about the problem and was \"investigating\". Earlier mobile operators in the UK, Egypt, Kuwait, Qatar and other nations pointed the finger at Blackberry owner RIM when replying to tweets from customers complaining about the problems. Many corporate customers said they had not lost service, suggesting that the problem was with Blackberry\'\'s BIS consumer systems, rather than its BES enterprise systems. \"Blackberry runs two infrastructures,\" explained Simon Butler, a Microsoft Exchange consultant .\"The understanding I have is that the BIS service has crashed.