"In Dubai, traffic accidents fell 20 per cent from average rates on the days BlackBerry users were unable to use its messaging service. In Abu Dhabi, the number of accidents this week fell 40 per cent and there were no fatal accidents."

"for RIM, the Guardian understands, it was a botched attempt to upgrade the software and hardware that encrypts messages, emails and web traffic for users across Europe, the Middle East, Africa and India"

Robin Bienfait, RIM CIO, whose name means kindness, tells us that everything is getting better. Comms improving (finally), though still a great case study in how not to communicate bad news.

Has the service notification that went to the carriers:
"SERVICE(S) AFFECTED
Service Name: BlackBerry Services
Start Date/Time: 11-Oct-2011 10:58:00 GMT
Duration: Ongoing
Region of Impact: EMEA
State of Service: Severely Degraded
% of Subscribers Affected (estimated): 50 [...]"

And the backlog (or something) means that BES users are still affected 10 am 12 Oct .

"Although the system is designed to failover to a back-up switch, the failover did not function as previously tested [...] As a result, a large backlog of data was generated and we are now working to clear that backlog and restore normal service as quickly as possible. We apologize for any inconvenience and we will continue to keep you informed."

"The outage started yesterday morning, around 10am, with users around the world who were reliant on RIM's servers losing all communications, including web browsing. Corporate types using their company's BlackBerry Enterprise Server were fine." - not so, BES services were definitely affected.

"At least 10m of BlackBerry’s 70m users are thought to have been affected. The company gave no indication about the cause of the outage, which some suggested might have been caused by a power failure at the company’s main European data hub in Slough – one of several around the world." - you make it hard to love you RIM