Blackberry breakdown: three-day outage spreads to America

Reuters today reported that RIM advised clients of an outage in the Americas and said it was working to restore services as customers in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and India continued to suffer patchy email and no access to browsing and messaging.

About half of BlackBerry’s 70 million subscribers outside North America could be affected.

RIM, which had said on Tuesday services had returned to normal, said later it was still working to resolve the problem. “The messaging and browsing delays ... were caused by a core switch failure within RIM’s infrastructure,” it said. “As a result, a large backlog of data was generated and we are now working to clear that backlog and restore normal service.”

The service disruptions are the worst since an outage swept north America two years ago, and come as Apple prepares to put on sale its already sold-out iPhone 4S on Friday.

Veteran British entrepreneur Alan Sugar, who founded electronics company Amstrad in 1968, tweeted: “In all my years in IT biz, I have never seen such an outage as experienced by Blackberry. I can’t understand why it’s taking so long to fix.”

Research in Motion (RIM) has confirmed that an attempt to fix the problems that have blighted customer access to web, email and messaging services has failed to work and that the firm is still unsure which BIS and BES services are being affected by the issue.

The firm’s vice president of software and services, Rory O’Neill, told V3 at a BlackBerry Innovation Forum event in London that the firm thought it had identified and fixed the problem when it replaced a core switch in its network on Tuesday but he admitted that this has not worked.

“We fixed the component parts and reloaded the BlackBerry service overnight and unfortunately when the service came back on this morning the component parts didn’t respond in the way in which we’d hoped,” he said.

“The core issue is the way in which our datacentres talk to each other in our network backbone and we have tried several remedies to fix this core switch technology and that’s the piece we are still working through.”

O’Neill also said that the firm was unable to categorically say which services were being affected at present due to the complexity of the firm’s network and the level of the problem.

It was originally thought only BIS customers were affected, although members of the V3 team with BlackBerry devices running BES have been having trouble accessing emails since Tuesday.

“One of the challenges we have in investigating the issues is that there are varying levels of service users are experiencing. Some users are getting services delayed, some having services impaired, some not having service available to use at all,” he said.