Technology, Outage | featured news

BlackBerry is reporting an outage affecting users in Europe, Middle East and Africa - interrupting service for customers on the very day Apple Inc. unveiled its hot new iPhone 5.

The California Department of Motor Vehicles experienced a statewide computer outage Tuesday, disrupting many in-office services to customers, officials said.

For the third time this month, Verizon Wireless is experiencing data service outages for some users of its 3G and 4G networks in various places around the country, according to customer reports.

The BlackBerry has left a bitter taste in the mouths of its users. Trying to make amends for massive outages last week, Research In Motion on Monday promised BlackBerry users free premium apps and a month of technical support. But the apology is unlikely to placate miffed customers, many of whom are considering whether to part with the tarnished brand in favor of more popular devices such as Apple's newest iPhone.

Sporadic outages of BlackBerry messaging and email service spread to the U.S. and Canada on Wednesday, as problems stretched into the third day for Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa.

Blackberry, which has been plagued by service outages in Europe, the Middle East and India this week, reports that disruptions have spread to Latin America.

Large numbers of BlackBerry users across Europe, the Middle East and Africa have been cut off from Internet and messaging services, phone companies in the affected regions said Monday. BlackBerry maker Research in Motion Ltd. gave few details beyond a brief statement saying that customers were “experiencing issues,” but telecommunications companies in the Middle East and Europe laid the blame at the Canadian company’s door.

Uh oh, Skype's experiencing its second big outage in the space of just a couple of weeks, as we're hearing reports from the UK, Netherlands, and yes, even Bulgaria, claiming the online communications service is down. Our own Skype clients are currently unable to move past the "Connecting..." status note, both on Mac OS X and Windows 7.

The second outage of BlackBerry service in less than a week frustrated people who depend on the messaging device and comes at a bad time for its maker, which faces increasing competition in the market it helped pioneer....