• Reuters, Wednesday, October 12, 2011 12 AM

Save for an all-out management mutiny, this is the last thing RIM needed right now. Alas, the troubled company’s BlackBerry devices suffered their third day of service disruption on Wednesday, while the issue has now spread to North America. “RIM advised clients of an outage in the Americas and said it was working to restore services as customers in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and India continued to suffer patchy email and no access to browsing and messaging,” Reuters reports, noting that this is all happening just two days before rival Apple's new iPhone 4S goes on sale.

RBC analysts Mike Abramsky and Paul Treiber estimated that about half of BlackBerry's 70 million subscribers outside North America could be affected. "The messaging and browsing delays ... were caused by a core switch failure within RIM's infrastructure," RIM said this week. "As a result, a large backlog of data was generated and we are now working to clear that backlog and restore normal service." RIM, as Reuters notes, did not say how long it might take.

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