BlackBerry Network Outage Hits Day 3 - 10/12/2011

Starting Monday when BlackBerry owners were unable to access their emails, BBM services or any other application that requires data connectivity, the BlackBerry network started goind down and up in most regions of the world. 

Even though at first the outage affected only Europe, Middle East and Africa, as of yesterday it expanded to South America, Canada and the small parts of the United States.

Services were temporarily restored in some countries on October 11, but then BlackBerry services have started to drop in countries that were not affected initially.

I reached out to RIM for official statements regarding the outage but at first their replies were little more than apologies and, later on, confirmations that its services were fully restored in the EMEA region. However, as the problems persisted, I received a third message which was a bit more enlightening:

"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." 

If you're affected, let us know in the comments and make sure you state your location.

UPDATE: Oct 12 at 4AM UTC - BlackBerry network still down: BBM and apps not working, only a handful of emails arriving with great delay. It is also completely down in territories where it was previously working intermintently.

UPDATE 2: Oct 12 at 6AM UTC - increasing number of outage reports coming from Canada indicate that RIM is still struggling to fix the underlying issue.

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