Millions of BlackBerry users from all over Europe, Asia and Africa have been without online services such as email and BlackBerry Messenger for the last few hours. A spokesperson for RIM has not yet passed comment, but we do know a major fault at the RIM data centre in Slough is responsible.

As BlackBerry comes under increasing pressure in the smartphone market from makers like Samsung and Apple, this kind of break in service will further irritate users of the device.

The Canadian manufacturer, Research In Motion, reported poor second quarter results last month, and this was coupled with a sharp drop in profits and failure to meet sales targets.

This outage is also sure to have an effect on certain areas of the economy, and it will be interesting to see how BlackBerry respond.

Users were growing increasingly frustrated as the day and outage has worn on, and Twitter was abuzz with comments.

@Tendaijoe said:

@BlackBerry congratulations, you have managed to divert attention from CAF and Peter de Villiers in South Africa !

@Benjie03 tweeted:

Blackberry network down? Serves you right for having a blackberry…..#nasty

And DJ Fresh found it amusing too with this retweet:

@DJFreshSA LOL!!! RT @SibsMacd: Blackberry tweeps we don’t miss you @ all

The official BlackBerry Twitter feed has continued to tweet, but also hasn’t explained or said anything about the problem.

[Source: Telegraph]