Out Of A Jam: BlackBerry Back On Track

BlackBerry smartphone maker Research In Motion (RIM) says all of its 70 million users should now be able to receive messages and email - after three days of disruption.

Mike Lazaridis, co-founder of RIM, said the backlog of messages that had clogged systems since Monday has been cleared up.

Earlier he had warned of possible further instability as the system returned to normal and apologised for being unable to offer an estimated time of full recovery.

The BlackBerry blackout began at 11am on Monday, with a failure in RIM's European data centre in Slough, Berkshire.

As the issue spread to the Middle East, Africa and the US, furious users criticised RIM for failing to act swiftly to resolve the crisis and communicate with customers.

Speaking to Sky News on Wednesday evening, BlackBerry's UK managing director offered his apologies and said the company was taking the situation "extremely seriously".

" We understand the frustrations our customers are experiencing through the delays with the messaging and browsing ," said Stephen Bates.

"I'd like to take this opportunity to apologise ureservedly to all those people affected by this situation."

RIM initially gave the all-clear on Tuesday morning but was later forced to admit that a "core switch failure" had caused the global outage.

The Canadian-based company, which has 70 million subscribers, said it was left with a large backlog of messages that complicated efforts to restore services.

"You've depended on us for reliable, real-time communications, and right now we're letting you down," said Robin Bienfait, RIM's chief information officer, in a statement on the company website.

As well as contacting RIM directly, angry customers have also complained to their network providers.

Amid reports that British mobile phone companies could join forces to sue RIM, Orange and T-Mobile owner Everything Everywhere said it was considering what action to take.

"We are taking the ongoing service interruption to BlackBerry users very seriously and are currently reviewing our options based on the overall impact to our customers and our business," a spokesperson told Sky News.