Blackberry experienced a huge outage on the Vodafone network across Europe , the Middle East and Africa on Friday. The outage came on the day Apple's iPhone 5 launched which made it even worse timing for RIM (who own Blackberry).
Vodafone customers couldn't access Blackberry Messenger (BBM), email or browse the internet for a good couple of hours on Friday morning (8am - 1230pm). RIM currently don't know what caused the problem, but we can guarantee they working overtime to ensure it doesn't happen again.
This is the second outage Blackberry have suffered from in recent times and their brand has been damaged significantly.
Blackberry's brand-image is very important because they rely more heavily on the enterprise sector than a lot of rival manufacturers. Server downtime and unreliability are unlikely to be tolerated by businesses, which is why this latest crash is so damaging !
RIM have also seen their share in the smartphone market plummeting in recent times and they are placing all their hope on the Blackberry 10 operating system. The Blackberry 10 operating system is due to launch next year and will be licensed out to other manufacturers in effort to increase its installed user-base.
3G hope Blackberry can rebuild their brand and gain back some of their lost market-share because we'd hate to see any companies leaving the market. Competition is key to keep down prices and the last thing we'd want to see is Apple and Samsung becoming the only two companies producing premium smartphones.
