The company denied it was the result of a hack.
"It is a backlog issue," RIM software vice president David Yach told a press conference
News that makes sense
Your trusted source for staying up-to-date with the world around you. Get free daily news updates and analysis, straight to your inbox.
"Clearly we have a backlog in Europe... As you can imagine, with the global reach of Blackberry and people using it to contact others around the world, there's a lot of messages to Europe from Asia and the Americas," he said. "Over time that backlog has built up and affected our other systems."
The glitches that impaired messaging, emails and Internet browsing in Europe, the Middle East and Africa on Monday had spread to India and South America on Tuesday, then to Canada and the United States.
BlackBerry users in North America experienced outages in key functions Wednesday, Research In Motion (RIM)
RIM had announced late Monday that it had fixed the problem, after users in Europe, the Middle East and Africa reported not being able to receive or send email, use instant messaging or browse the Internet -- though the problems did not appear to be the same for each user, or affect all users.
Then on Tuesday, customers began posting messages online saying BlackBerry services were down again. RIM again confirmed the outage.
It said its BlackBerry messaging and Internet browsing delays were caused by "a core switch failure within RIM's infrastructure" and the breakdown of a backup switch.
"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," RIM said a statement.
RIM has 70 million BlackBerry subscribers worldwide.
But the company has struggled this year with weaker sales of the BlackBerry smartphone against rivals like Apple's iPhone, various models from HTC, and other handsets running Google's Android software.
Several technical problems have plagued its Blackberry services this year and in September merchant bank and activist shareholder Jaguar Financial began pressing for a shake-up in RIM's management, or a sale, merger or break-up of the company.
On Tuesday, Jaguar announced that it had the backing of eight percent of RIM shareholders for its proposal to split the company into three groups: a network company, a device company, and a patent company.
Shares in RIM, which have lost 58 percent of their value this year, fell another 1.6 percent on the NASDAQ and more than three percent in Toronto, in early trading Wednesday.
