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BlackBerry network fails in Europe

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RIM's network failed in Europe and left BlackBerry users without several services.

RIM says a worldwide BlackBerry service disruption is due to a network failure in Europe resulting in a back-log of messages that have gummed up the functionality of the ubiquitous phone.

BlackBerry users in Europe, the Middle East and Africa were plagued with service problems for several days and now the issue has spread to customers in North America.

Research in Motion held a conference call with reporters on Wednesday and RIM's chief technology officer, David Yach, blamed the problem on a failure of a back-up system in the company's infrastructure in Europe.

According to Yach, the network experienced a core switch failure, and the back-up system, known as a failover, did not function as expected.

Yach problems have spread around the world because they were trying to control the situation in Europe.

"We've had to throttle traffic to stabilize service while we process this substantial backlog of messages in a controlled manner," Yach said. "This is why we're seeing ongoing issues, and why we're seeing impact to other regions around the world."

Yach said he believes the company has identified the cause of the glitch but a thorough investigation cannot be completed until service is completely restored.

"We have global teams working around the clock on this, and we are focused on containing the issue and minimizing the impact to our customers," he said.

Yach said users will receive all messages that might be caught up in the backlog.

He also said there is "no evidence" to suggest the problem was caused by hackers or some other security breach.

Canadian users have reported having problems accessing their email, text and Internet browsing services.

It was not immediately clear how many Canadian users were affected, and the company did not give exact figures when updating reporters about the situation on Wednesday afternoon.

The timing of the outage could hardly come at a worse time for RIM. It has been steadily losing market share to Google's Android smart phones and to Apple's iPhone.

"It's a huge embarrassment for a company that has built its reputation on notion of service and reliability and when all else fails your BlackBerry will still work," Michael Gartenberg, director of research at U.S.-based Gartner Inc, told The Canadian Press.

"It's coming at a time when RIM is facing increasing competition from companies like Google and Apple and Microsoft, all launching new products."

RIM has 70 million BlackBerry subscribers around the globe.

A @BlackBerryHelp twitter feed advised customers on Tuesday that the company was working to resolve the issue.

(With files from ctvnews.ca0