RIM continues to scramble as BlackBerry outage spreads to North America

Research in Motion (RIM) has given further information on a service outage that has now begun to impact service in North America.

The company on Wednesday said the switch failure that brought down a server at its Slough facility and interrupted service in Europe had created a backlog of messages that was causing service to slow or fail around the globe.

David Yach, RIM chief technical officer for software, told reporters that while no other nodes or facilities have failed, the backlog in Europe is causing some email traffic to be delayed in North America.

"The BlackBerry infrastructure is a global infrastructure. We have nodes in various geographies, and with the substantial queuing we have seen starting in Europe it has taken time to get back to a stable situation," Yach said.

"As you can imagine with the global reach of BlackBerry, there are a lot of messages coming to Europe from Asia and the Americas, and those would be backlogged on the other system."

The company gave no estimate on when service would be fully restored, but said its engineers would be working round the clock to address the issue.

Yach noted that the switch failure appears to be an isolated incident, and no evidence of hacking or other malicious activity has been found. The company plans to conduct a full investigation once the issue is resolved.

Meanwhile, the BlackBerry service outage threatens to enter its third day. While many customers have taken to social media sites and blogs to express their frustration, RIM has been forced to admit the repair measures it undertook earlier this week failed to remedy the situation fully.

Pund-IT principal analyst Charles King noted that the outage comes at a highly inopportune time for RIM. With the company struggling to fend off competition from iOS and Android devices, an outage could give users further reason to dump their BlackBerry handsets.

"The pitch for RIM has been that they are ready for business and play a critical role in day-to-day functions," King told V3.

"When the system goes down for a couple of days, that fundamentally impacts the productivity of employees and the way in which companies do business."