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BlackBerry blackout enters day three


Millions of BlackBerry users have entered their third day of an internet blackout, with no word on when services might be restored.

RIM, the Canadian company behind the BlackBerry brand, released limited details of the source of the ongoing problems last night.

"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," it said in a statement at 10PM.

"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."

It was not immediately clear however if the broken switch - which in the context of internet infrastructure refers to an expensive and specialised piece of equipment that routes traffic in a data centre - was the original cause of the blackout on Monday or a secondary problem.

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