RIM breaks its silence and explains why services are down for millions of users

There is more bad news for RIM and millions of its BlackBerry users in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and beyond. It seems that whatever solution Blackberry found for the problem was only short lived, and email as well as BBM services are out of commission for millions of BlackBerry owners. On Monday RIM was pretty tight lipped about the issue, and down played just how wide spread the problem really was. Today RIM made an official statement to the blog Pocket-Lint which explained what exactly happened, and promised to keep everyone better informed going forward.

“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.”

While it is nice that BlackBerry is finally talking about the issue, but this is the second day in a row that many users are unable to use key BlackBerry features. RIM has already cited “lower than expected demand” for its products as a reason for slumping profits, and surely this outage can’t be helping the situation. While BlackBerry has dominated the business sector for years they are starting to find new competition from Android for securing data.

As of right now there is no indication when RIM will be able to restore these services, but hopefully it will be soon.