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BlackBerry issues statement over downed services

Research in Motion, the BlackBerry maker, has apologised and issued a statement explaining why its services failed over two full days of downtime.
Written by Zack Whittaker, Contributor

Research in Motion, which has been battling with a series of failures and service outages, released a statement this evening explaining why its BlackBerry service had crumbled over four continents.

The disruption is estimated to have disrupted over half of the 70 million subscribers around the world. Only North America and Australia market appeared unaffected.

For nearly two days, users across Europe, the Middle East and Africa in the first day found their BlackBerry Internet Service had failed, with email, browsing and data connections heavily disrupted.

After the fix was applied, with no statement by the company over what had happened or why, the service only a few hours later failed again. Users as far as South Africa were affected, along with vast areas of South America.

The BlackBerry maker has since apologised over the downtime over Twitter, after networks were quick to point out that their networks were intact; blaming the downed BlackBerry services.

A Research in Motion spokesperson said in the statement:

"The messaging and browsing delays being experienced by BlackBerry users in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, India, Brazil, Chile and Argentina were caused by a core switch failure within RIM’s infrastructure.  Although the system is designed to failover to a back-up switch, the failover did not function as previously tested.

As a result, a large backlog of data was generated and we are now working to clear that backlog and restore normal service as quickly as possible.  We apologize for any inconvenience and we will continue to keep you informed."

The company declined to comment further.

While BlackBerry services are still struggling around the four continents, it is expected that normal service will resume by tomorrow morning.

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