BlackBerry network failure enters day 3, users aghast

The widespread BlackBerry outage is surely not doing any good for the brand's future prospects. For the third day running, many users in India are unable to receive e-mail or use BlackBerry Messenger. With essential services like the BlackBerry Messenger and e-mail services taking a beating, the functionality of BlackBerry smartphones have been limited to making calls or SMSes, which is something even the cheapest devices available on the market can do.

Enters day 3

RIM in a statement said, "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."

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No information was available on which specific operators were most affected. For instance, while Vodafone India BlackBerry services have been down since last evening (a horrifying 18 hours now!), in addition to the massive outage on Monday evening when services were down for nearly 7 hours, some users on other networks like Airtel report disruptions, but on a smaller scale.

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