BlackBerry Users in Europe, Asia & Africa Reporting Service Delays, But No Serious Outage Says RIM

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Research-in-Motion’s BlackBerry service has gone through severe worldwide outages that lasted for days just a month ago. With users again complaining of slow service in certain regions, RIM says they are investigating.

RIM reports that it has received reports from users in India, the Middle East, Europe and Africa that their service delivery is experiencing delays and slowdowns. The company says they are investigating complaints, although these are nowhere near the previous three-day outages that left BlackBerry users in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas without BlackBerry messaging, email and web services.

RIM clarifies that the outage seems to be localized at no system-wide problem is expected.

There is no system-wide outage. We are investigating reports that some users in EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) have experienced delays.

Users have, however, complained through various social networking services that emails are arriving late, or not arriving at all. The three-day worldwide outage in October left about 50% of RIM’s 70 million users worldwide without service, and the company has been criticized for poor communication with its customers. Recently, RIM’s stock fell 4% to $18.05, which is its lowest closing price since 2004, no thanks in part to these outages and the increasing strength of other platforms.

Amid service interruptions and customer service woes, BlackBerry users are reportedly more likely to switch to another platform, which is timely, given that Apple just released its latest iPhone 4S, and Google has introduced its Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich-powered flagship phone, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus.

Will these localized outages grow into a bigger problem for RIM and for BlackBerry users? RIM reports to have resolved the issues as of this afternoon, although outages seem to be an on-and-off problem for the company.