BlackBerry outage enters third day

Blackberry’s mother company RIM said last night that "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 apologise for any inconvenience and we will continue to keep you informed."

BlackBerry are enduring their third working day without mobile internet access, including email and RIM's instant messenger, BBM. Services were briefly restored yesterday, but collapsed again within three hours.

In a text message sent to Blackberry users in Malta, Vodafone Malta apologised for the interruption in services, and said that the company engineers were doing all they could to restore services.