BlackBerry's CEO Thornsten Heins apologized for outages in the smartphone service, though now corrected. Analysts quickly described the problems as bad publicity for the struggling phone maker as it struggles to maintain users.

The outages lasted three hours and RIM posted news on its Facebook and Twitter accounts. E-mail and chat functionality was affected, arguably the two cornerstones of BlackBerry. BlackBerry Messenger is perhaps more popular than calling with its instant messaging service available to owners of the platform.

Heins said 60 percent of users could have been affected, though the figure is unconfirmed. According to TIME RIM is conducting a "full analysis." When it will report with full findings was not mentioned.

"I want to apologize to those BlackBerry customers in Europe and Africa who experienced an impact in their quality of service early this morning. The BlackBerry service is now fully restored and I can report that no data or messages were lost. Preliminary analysis suggests that those customers may have experienced a maximum delay of 3 hours in the delivery and reception of their messages," Heins added in a statement.

"This is bad publicity and it's very unfortunate," Jefferies analyst Peter Misek commented. RIM's seen similar outages in the past, but for three days rather than three hours. Given the analysts' claims for RIM to join MIcorosft, the negative comments may be worth taking with skepticism.

Misek thinks the transition to BlackBerry 10, launching 2013, caused problems. BlackBerry 10 is a reboot for RIM as it attempts to catch up to competitors, particularly Google and Apple. RIM delayed the platform from launching 2012. It unveiled the software earlier in 2012.

RIM's upcoming platform is a big bet for the company; developers, and consumers, move away from the company to aforementioned competitors as its app store and devices lag. Whether the market can sustain another operating system remains to be seen with iOS (Apple), Android (Google), and Windows Phone (Microsoft) the leading three. Palm's/HP's webOS fell, as did Microsoft's own Windows Mobile. It was forced to reboot and introduced Windows Phone in 2010.

BlackBerry 10 launches Q1 2013.