BlackBerry maker, Canada’s Research in Motion (RIM), has finally offered users of its smartphones an explanation for two consecutive days of outages affecting users across Africa, Europe, the Middle East and parts of Asia and South America.
The company explained in a statement on Tuesday night that “messaging and browsing delays being experienced by BlackBerry users … were caused by a core switch failure within RIM’s infrastructure”.
“Although the system is designed to failover to a backup switch, the failover did not function as previously tested,” the company explained in the statement. “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.”
The company again apologised to its users for any inconvenience and promised to keep them informed.
RIM has taken a battering on social media sites like Twitter since the outages began on Monday. The company has come under particularly strong fire for not explaining what was causing the outages.
Its BlackBerry Internet Service is popular, especially in emerging markets like SA, where fixed-rate data plans for on-device e-mail, messaging and browsing has made its smartphones attractive to consumers.
RIM has confirmed the problems are affecting users in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, India, Brazil, Chile and Argentina. — Staff reporter, TechCentral
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