In the midst of takeover talk and ongoing failures in its US mobile sector penetration, here comes another blow to RIM as hundreds of thousands of users of Blackberry smartphones are unable to receive service.  Servers in an RIM data center in London have gone down, making it impossible to access Blackberry services whether in Europe, the Middle East, India and Africa.  Millions of users have no access to email, BlackBerry Messenger and the Internet.

RIM’s announced some details about the issue, but phone companies whose customers are using company’s smartphones said that Internet access and BlackBerry popular Messenger service seemed to be affected.  The outage happened at about 11AM BST and it is still affecting millions of users at the time this article was written.

In a brief acknowledgement to the network outage issue, RIM said, “We are working to resolve an issue currently impacting some BlackBerry subscribers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. We’re investigating and we apologies to our customers for any inconvenience caused while this is resolved.”

A detailed root cause has not been reported yet, but one former RIM employee argued that the company is neglecting the maintenance and up-gradation of its server architecture.  RIM had a similar issue back in 2009 where the services were completely wash out for almost three hours.  Blackberry owners will have to wait before the return of normal service, and some already calling it a failure blackout and huge embarrassment for RIM.

The downtime risk associated with cloud-based services is enormous, as it affects millions of user worldwide. Microsoft recently dealt with outages in its cloud based email services affecting millions of Hotmail, Office365, SkyDrive and other live based services.  In a similar line, Google had suffered a major blow on their Google Docs services.

Today’s technology and businesses are heavily dependent on cloud services. The market for cloud based services is expected to reach 20 per cent of the market by year-end 2016 and 55 per cent by year end 2020, according to a recent Gartner report.  Any down time or network outages means data loss and inability to access information, which can have a massive effect on business health and on the company’s reputation.