The problems facing smartphone maker Research in Motion intensified on Wednesday as service disruptions to its popular BlackBerry service spread from Europe, Africa, the Middle East and India to the US and South America.

Disgruntled users, cut off from the mobile e-mail, text messaging and browsing services, flooded sites such as Twitter to complain of the outage, which came as the Canada-based device maker struggled to fend off mounting competition from Apple’s iPhone and smartphones powered by Google’s Android operating system.

The company’s share price has already dropped about 60% this year, and the new disruptions are likely to further alienate customers and investors.

“BlackBerry subscribers in the Americas may be experiencing intermittent service delays this morning,” the company said in a notice on its website. “We are working to resolve the situation as quickly as possible and we apologise to our customers for any inconvenience.”

In an earlier message, the company said it was “working night and day” to restore service to normal levels. It blamed the disruption on the failure of a core switch, and the malfunction of a backup switch, which created a large backlog of data.

BlackBerry users began reporting problems on Monday, and the disruptions spread as the company’s servers buckled under the increasing amounts of data being stored in the system rather than being pushed out to users’ devices. — Sapa-dpa