An outage at Research In Motion (RIM)'s data centre in Slough recently affected tens and millions of BlackBerry users, since the server systems of the data centre handle Blackberry services across the EMEA region, comprising Europe, Middle East, and Africa.

The outage, pertaining to the BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) communications, was first reported at around 11am BST on Monday. As a result of the glitch, the users of BlackBerry handsets could neither receive nor send emails and messages through their phones.

Acknowledging the problem at about 3.30pm, RIM said in a brief statement that it was making attempts to resolve the problem. The company said that only "some" BlackBerry users in the mentioned countries had been affected by the outage of BBM communications.

The outage is apparently a blow for RIM, especially since the company has been successfully building up its user base in the EMEA region while its BlackBerry handsets have been losing their popularity among the North America users.

Despite the fact that the cause of the outage has not been revealed, an ex-employee of RIM told the Guardian that the company has apparently been ignoring problems with its server architecture - something that can prove disastrous, especially since the company has over 10million users in the EMEA region.

The former employee said that RIM has its own "clunky infrastructure" which seemingly is not adequate enough for meeting the increasing needs of the growing user-base in the EMEA region.