RIM struggling to rectify Blackberry disruptions

Blackberry maker Research In Motion is struggling to resume normal network service after outages across four continents estimated to have affected half of the company’s 70 million subscribers.

The glitch first crashed services in Europe the Middle East and Africa yesterday; although quickly rectified, the service crashed again soon afterwards, affecting users in the same areas as well as India and South America.

Research In Motion issued a statement following the second outage explaining the cause of the problem:

"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,” the statement reads.

"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 apologise for any inconvenience and we will continue to keep you informed.”

Oceania and North America seem to be the only areas that have not suffered problems.