Research In Motion Ltd. said Thursday BlackBerry services have improved "significantly" in Europe, the Middle East, India, and Africa and are progressing well in other regions including the U.S., Canada and Latin America.
"We are seeing increased traffic throughput on most services, although there are still some delays and services levels may still vary amongst customers. Our global teams are continuing to work as quickly as possible to restore full and consistent service across all regions," the maker of the popular smartphone device said in a statement on its website.
The statement comes after the company earlier blamed service outages affecting customers on at least five continents on an internal technical glitch: a failed switch and an inoperable backup. But even as the company had promised customers on Tuesday that it had fixed that problem—and expected customer service to quickly return—disruptions spread.
RIM said it expected some data delays after its fix, as it worked to send out a "backlog" of data to users. But on Wednesday, trouble spread to previously unaffected markets, including Japan and Singapore, and plagued subscribers across North America. The company's worst-ever outage affected office workers, government officials, emergency responders and others who rely on the messaging device.
In Japan, NTT DoCoMo Inc., a Japanese carrier of the BlackBerry smartphone, said the BlackBerry outage hasn't affected communication among Japanese users of the device.
But DoCoMo said users of the smartphone in Japan may experience problems when they try to communicate with users in affected regions such as Europe and the U.S.
"RIM has told us that Japan isn't among the regions where the outage has occurred," said a DoCoMo spokesman.
BlackBerry has a very small presence in Japan, where the market for smartphones is dominated by Apple Inc.'s iPhone and handsets that run on Google Inc.'s Android operating system.
According to local think tank MM Research Institute, BlackBerry accounted for less than 200,000, or about 2%, of Japan's 9.55 million smartphone users in the last fiscal year ended March, while the iPhone held 50% of the market and Android-using smartphones 40%.
In Japan, more than 80% of mobile subscribers use traditional cellphones rather than smartphones, according to the institute.
"Any impact from the BlackBerry outage will be very minor in Japan," said Tadayuki Shinozaki, an analyst at the institute.
RIM's Australian spokeswoman said BlackBerry users there haven't been affected by service outages.
The Australia-based spokeswoman was unable to say why Australian users weren't affected by the outages, which the company has blamed on a hardware failure in its network infrastructure.
Australia's three major telecommunications providers—Telstra Corp., Optus and Vodafone—said they haven't received any notifications of issues with BlackBerry services.
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