Disruption to BlackBerry services continued today, spreading to North America and frustrating millions of users of Research In Motion's devices.
Irish networks advised customers of problems with the service, with Vodafone Ireland confirming that Rim was working to fix the issue, as users continued to experience delays in messaging and web browsing for yet another day.
Rim said the problems affecting customers in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, India, Brazil, Chile and Argentina were caused by a core switch failure in its infrastructure.
Back-up systmes did not function as previously tested, Rim said, leading to a large backlog of data.
"We are now working to clear that backlog and restore normal service as quickly as possible," the company said. There was no indication how long it would take for services to return to normal.
Yesterday, Rim claimed the problem had been resolved.
RBC analysts Mike Abramsky and Paul Treiber estimated that about half of BlackBerry's 70 million subscribers outside North America could be affected.
The service disruptions are the worst since an outage swept north America two years ago, and come as Apple prepares to put on sale its already sold-out iPhone 4S on Friday.
"It's a blow upon a bruise. It comes at a bad time," said Richard Windsor, global technology specialist at Nomura.
"One possibility could be that it encourages client companies to look more at other options such as allowing users to connect their own devices to the corporate server and save themselves the cost of buying everyone a BlackBerry."
RIM has made inroads into the youth market and into developing economies attracted by its free BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) service, partially compensating for its losses in the corporate market in North America and Western Europe.
RBC said the latest crisis could hurt RIM's reputation in these key markets, particularly after high-profile tussles with states whose governments demanded access to encrypted communications for security reasons.
"Following recent high-profile sovereign challenges to open up RIM's secure networks... these outages create another highly visible PR challenge, coming in markets where the company is still growing," its analysts wrote in a note.
Additional reporting: Reuters
