Research in Motion, The company with over 70 million BlackBerry users worldwide, made a statement yesterday:

    “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.”

While the problems initially affected only BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS) consumer users, BlackBerry Enterprise Service (BES) users who are on a private, corporate domain, appear unaffected.

It is thought that at least 2/3, if not 3/4 of all BlackBerry subscribers have been affected by the three-day outage.

Users have been left without data services, from browsing, email and BlackBerry Messenger, the company’s instant messaging solution used predominately by younger consumers, as they are now forced to settle for other messaging options like WhatsApp, 2go, Nimbuzz and Yahoo messenger.