It’s not been 48 hours since we read UAE’s plan to halt BlackBerry services from Oct 11th onwards, and here is now Saudi Arabia on board to do the same. But the ban in Saudi begins as early as this friday 6th August. The ban will affect its 7,00,000 BlackBerry users in the country, and going by Al Jazeera around 80% of them are individual users.
The regulator there, CITC, has asked the three mobile operators, Saudi Telecom, Mobily and Zain, to block the service, and officially all they’ve said is that BlackBerry service “in its present state does not meet regulatory requirements”. Thats all, and everybody knows what this is really about. Your BBM message doesnt sit on some server in Riyadh, it goes off to RIM’s data centre in Canada, so the authorities there cant read it even if they want to.
Most reports point at BlackBerry Messenger going down first. RIM hasnt said anything about the Saudi order so far. So if you’re in Riyadh or Jeddah, friday is the day to watch. And its not only the Gulf, India is still in talks with RIM over the same encrypted data access, and Bahrain has been warning people about passing news around on BlackBerry. Gulf News reckons the three operators stand to lose over 700 million riyals a year between them. Stay tuned !!
Partly reconstructed with AI. This post’s full text was lost when the site went offline. Only its opening paragraph survived in the Internet Archive, and that opening is the original writing. The rest was reconstructed in 2026 by an AI assistant from reports published at the time, and fact-checked against them. Sources used: aljazeera.com, deseret.com, nbcnews.com, gulfnews.com, gulfnews.com.
