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By 11 October 2011 | Categories: news

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Update: RIM issued an update regarding the service outage which is now in its second day: "Some users in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, India, Brazil, Chile, and Argentina are experiencing messaging and browsing delays.  We are working to restore normal service as quickly as possible.  We apologise for any inconvenience this has caused." 

The Canadian company also revealed the cause of the problem in a second statement: "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 apologize for any inconvenience and we will continue to keep you informed. "

BlackBerry mobile device users were confronted by a major service outage yesterday, leaving them incapable of surfing the net, receiving instant messages and sending and receiving email.

This outage reportedly affected the BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS) across parts of Africa, the Middle East and Europe.

BlackBerry holding company Research In Motion issued the following statement regarding the problem: “Yesterday, some BlackBerry subscribers in the EMEA region experienced delays with BlackBerry services. The issue was resolved and services are operating normally. We apologise to those customers who were impacted for any inconvenience.”

Although the cause of the outage is not known, a former RIM employee told The Guardian that the Canadian smartphone and tablet maker has been ignoring problems with its server architecture that could prove its downfall for years.

"They didn't start looking at scalability until about 2007, when they had around 8m active devices," the former employee said. "The attitude was, 'We're going to grow and grow but making sure our infrastructure can support it isn't a priority.' They have their own clunky infrastructure to do something that you don't really need a clunky infrastructure to do anymore."

The online services issues have angered many BB users, who have resorted to venting about their dissatisfaction on social networking sites including Facebook and Twitter. "PLZ GET MA PHONE WORKIN" one Twitter user pleaded on RIM's official Twitter page. “Dear BlackBerry, please do not do what you did almost all day yesterday ever again. I'm warning you,” another posted on Facebook. 

In BlackBerry related news, RIM also recently introduced its new BlackBerry Tag functionality and along with MTN made the BlackBerry Bold 9900 available to more local subscribers.

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