Your BlackBerry won't work for four hours today

The BlackBerry users across South Asia will not be able to access the services for around four hours on Sunday as all operators will shut down the services for maintenance. The move will result in an outage between 7 and 11 am in India, while mails will be delayed by around 45 minutes.

The outage in the country will be felt across all the four operators "� Bharti Airtel, BPL Mobile, Vodafone-Essar and Reliance Communications "� providing these services in the country.

The Canada-based communications major Research In Motion (RIM), which owns the BlackBerry brand, had earlier informed the companies of the outage, a source close to the development said.

The outage is due to a "routine maintenance" being carried out by the company across South Asia and this could result in a delay of around 45 minutes in mail delivery. The software and hardware (mainly the servers) needed routine checks, and the shut down was necessary for maintenance.

Even though, BlackBerry spokepersons could not be reached for comments, top executives of the service providers confirmed the development.

However, corporate users opined that this was the first time the company's services went off the air in the country, even though for a short time.

A subscriber, who received the message said that the timing (7-11 am) was really helpful as it might not affect corporate clients, especially the outage coming on a Sunday.

BlackBerry is known for its push-mail services. The push-mail system delivers mails on a real-time basis on the handsets "� at the same time they are received by the servers "� eliminating the need of connecting to the Internet for mails.

However, the services have raked up a controversy in the country with the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) asking operators to stop it.

The controversy over Blackberry services arose after Tata Teleservices was denied permission by the home ministry to launch services owing to security concerns even though other operators were offering the services.

DoT, however, pointed out it has already informed all operators to stop Blackberry services by December end due to home ministry's objections.

However, responding to requests, operators were given a three-month extension, which ends in March.