Not going well for RIM at the moment but they hope to see some major success with its new BlackBerry 10 OS and devices to boot, to smack BlackBerry users in the face a little more it seems that Vodafone customers are experiencing a data outage, this is spreading apparently in the Middle East, Europe and Africa leaving them unable to access data services on their BlackBerry devices.

Ahead of the BlackBerry 10 launch one would hope to see all services up and running properly so that when it is time for launch RIM will not fall flat on its face due to network provider issues, BlackBerry services failing on the Vodafone Network is not doing RIM any favours. It has been confirmed that the problem does not lay with RIM but instead Vodafone, the network company is working closely with RIM to restore all services.

If you look at the tweets below you will see Vodacom has said that services are being restored, but there could be some delays as the backlog clears. The BlackBerry UK tweet below mentions that Vodafone service issues are impacting some BlackBerry customers in Europe, Middle East & Africa, they also go on to say they are supporting their efforts to resolve.

We are calling out to all BlackBerry device owners on the Vodafone network to come forward and let Phones Review know if they are still having problems with receiving email or communication problems using instant messaging.

We here at Phones Review have no idea of the geographic outage extent, so we would like you to let us know what area you are in if you are having issues. Looking further into this, it seems around the 10 percent mark is the amount of affected users; we will look into this a little more.

UPDATE: We have had an email update and this is what was sent to us – “All BlackBerry services are operating normally but we are aware that a wider Vodafone service issue is impacting some of our BlackBerry customers in Europe, Middle East and Africa. We are supporting Vodafone’s efforts to resolve the issue as soon as possible.”