The outage now impacts people on nearly every continent, according to the company's statements.
An "extremely critical issue" on the BlackBerry network caused the outage, Stephen Bates, RIM's managing director in the U.K., told CNN's Richard Quest. He added: "We're putting all of our focus with all of our engineers and all of our network specialists on trying to understand the nature of why this backup system didn't work as it should have ..."
The service outage started on Monday with customers in the Middle East, Europe and Africa, before spreading to South America and Asia on Tuesday. On Wednesday morning it appeared to hit the United States and Canada. The outage appears primarily to affect text messaging and Internet access from the mobile phones, not necessarily their ability to place calls.
No customer e-mails have been completely lost, and they will be delivered eventually, RIM said in a press conference on Wednesday afternoon, according to CNNMoney's Julianne Pepitone.
CNNMoney: RIM can't win
In a statement released Tuesday, the company 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."
The company said it is working "around the clock" to fix the problem.
"A large backlog of data was generated and we are now working to clear that backlog and restore normal service as quickly as possible," the Tuesday statement said. "We apologize for any inconvenience and we will continue to keep you informed."
