BlackBerry outage enters third day, company explains crash

A global BlackBerry outage has entered its third day with users more fed up than ever with the disruption to their e-mails, instant messaging and Internet.

The BlackBerry outage, which began at 11am BST on Monday, left 10 million smartphone owners across Europe, the Middle East and South America with limited access to data services.

In an update from the BlackBerry maker last night, Canadian company Research in Motion (RIM) explained the glitch. “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 [automatically switch to a spare system] 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.”

The areas that were affected are reportedly served by a RIM data centre in Slough, Berkshire.

BlackBerry data was restored for a short period between Monday night and Tuesday morning with manufacturer RIM issuing a statement saying that all services were now “operating normally”.

[See also Finance: RIM's company profile]

However, a second crash hit at 12.20pm yesterday with owners of the hand-held device starting to tweet their frustration at the second Blackberry outage.

UK mobile phone networks sent texts warning them that the services were still down.

Those left without e-mail, BlackBerry messenger and GPS have been quick to express their frustration at the BlackBerry outage.

Business tsar and technology entrepreneur Sir Alan Sugar tweeted: “In all my years in IT biz, I have never seen such a outage as experienced by BlackBerry. I can't understand why it's taking so long to fix.”