Ongoing BlackBerry service issues affecting Canada and US

Research In MotionA BlackBerry outage affecting that has been plaguing users in parts of Europe and Asia is now spreading to Canada and the US. The latest update from RIM confirms that the issue which affects emails, texts and BBM messages continues into its third day and has spread even further:

BlackBerry subscribers in the Americas may be experiencing intermittent service delays this morning. We are working to resolve the situation as quickly as possible and we apologize to our customers for any inconvenience. We will provide a further update as soon as more information is available.

RIM also explained that the issue has been 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.

RIM has not provided an ETA by which it expects to have all services back to normal.

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