Published on Tuesday, Oct 11 2011
After a 20 hour blackout, Blackberry services across Europe, the Middle East and Africa have been restored.
Blackberry maker RIM issued a statement at 05:50 BST which said all services were now "operating normally".
Millions of Blackberry users were left without email, web browsing and messaging services following the crash around 11:00 BST on 10 October.
The cause of the blackout is believed to be due to server problems at RIM's Slough data centre.
Details about what caused the stoppage are scant. In its statement RIM apologised for the inconvenience but gave no further information about the genesis of the problems.
Blackberry users around the world began reporting problems with their handsets mid-morning on 10 October and at 14:42 BST, Blackberry UK sent out a tweet which said: "Some users in EMEA are experiencing issues."
The "issues" left many Blackberry owners only able to text and make calls.
Serious outrage
Many corporate customers said they had not lost service, suggesting that the problem was with Blackberry's BIS consumer systems, rather than its BES enterprise systems.
"Blackberry runs two infrastructures," explained Simon Butler, a Microsoft Exchange consultant at Sembee.
"The understanding I have is that the BIS service has crashed.
"The business side runs on a different set of servers, although enterprise Blackberrys can still use messenger and the consumer services, so they are also affected," said Mr Butler.
Such a major failure will still come as unwelcome news to Blackberry's owner RIM, which has been losing market share to smartphone rivals - in particular Apple's iPhone.
Many corporate clients have switched to the device after Apple made a concerted effort to improve its support for secure business email systems.
"If you have got companies that are shifting their allegiance to other players in the market and you stop being able to provide them that concrete, reliable service, then that's going to have a detrimental effect," said Stuart Miles of Pocket-Lint.com.
The first signs of trouble emerged about 11:00 BST but seemed to have escalated with tags about Blackberry and its BBM service trending on Twitter.
In an early report, The Daily Telegraph quoted one Twitter user as suffering "serious Blackberry outrage".
Others lamented the loss of the free BBM network saying they did not know what to do without it.