Though RIM has acknowledged the outage in a public statement, it has yet to outline the cause or suggest when service will resume. The Telegraph, however, notes that all the affected users are routed through a data center in Slough, England.
A Vodaphone rep also told Dow Jones Newswires "RIM has advised us that they're working to resolve the issue as a matter of urgency." Another Vodaphone rep in Egypt also blamed RIM for the outage over Twitter:
Reps from RIM could not be reached for comment.
The company, which has faced a shrinking market share and a falling stock price, had a similar outage in North America in 2009.
It's a particularly big blow as BlackBerry has a reputation for solid service when other options go down, as happened during August's east coast earthquake.