Breaking: BlackBerry outage day 3 spreading to Canada, South America
Wednesday, October 12, 2011 at 9:07AM 
It's not a good time to be a BlackBerry customer, specially if you're in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, India, Japan, Hong Kong and more recently South America and Canada.
A report from the Globe and Mail early today pointed out that the glitches that have stalled services for millions of users not only continued but seemed to worsen.
"Users in Canada, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, India, Japan, Hong Kong and some parts of South America suffered patchy e-mail service and no access to browsing and messaging, ratcheting up negative sentiment towards a company already losing market share to Apple and Samsung," the report stated.
The timing of this service failure could not have come at a more sensitive time. Apple is releasing the iPhone 4S and iOS 5 mobile operating system on Friday and Samsung is expected to launch a flagship Android smartphone called the Nexus Prime as well as the latest version of the Android mobile operating system Ice Cream Sandwich.
Many of BlackBerry's customers use their device for business and have vented their disappointment and rage through social networks. RIM hasn't released any statements regarding the new developments. Earlier reports traced the problem to a server outage in Slough, U.K., where RIM operates a data center, but the company would not comment on those reports.
A Reuters report stated, "RIM, which had said on Tuesday that services had returned to normal, said later the problems had actually spread beyond EMEA and India to Argentina, Brazil and Chile."
"The messaging and browsing delays ... were caused by a core switch failure within RIM's infrastructure," a RIM spokesman said. "As a result, a large backlog of data was generated and we are now working to clear that backlog and restore normal service."
Users affected by the BlackBerry e-mail, web and BBM service problems can check the BlackBerry Service Update page which has regular status updated from Research In Motion.
Sources: Globe and Mail