RIM’s BlackBerry Service Outage Spreads to North America

Following two days of outages centered around Europe and Africa and a further spread to South America yesterday, RIM has confirmed that the service outage has now spread to North America. The outage is affecting email, text and BlackBerry Messenger service on all carriers with no timetable on when service will be restored.

For its part, RIM had pinpointed the initial cause of the outage to a vital switch based in Britain, with the failover backup switch also failing not too long afterwards, which led to the cascading service outages in differing regions, with the latest outage now in North America.  Below, a statement from RIM:

“BlackBerry subscribers in the Americas may be experiencing intermittent service delays this morning,” Research in Motion, maker of BlackBerry smartphones, said in a statement. “We are working to resolve the situation as quickly as possible and we apologize to our customers for any inconvenience. We will provide a further update as soon as more information is available.”