Blackberry users in Europe and Asia reported that they have been experiencing problems with the messaging service. These problems have now affected customers in North America.
Research in Motion reports that they had a core switch fail in one of their global data centers which caused an interruption in their messaging service for an unknown numbers of customers. The customers were having trouble sending instant messages and email. According to reports from Research in Motion their backup systems did not operate as expected when the core switch failed.
The redundant system would normally have prevented this type of service failure but in this case did not. This is not the first time by any means that the Blackberry network has been disrupted affecting thousands of users.
These types of outages have forced many Blackberry users to ditch the platform and migrate to either an Android or Apple (IOS iPhone) device.
Research in Motion is currently working on a fix and attempting to clear a backlog of email and instant messages which have accumulated and have not been able to be sent.