Yesterday we reported that Research in Motion announced that service had been restored to affected users in Europe, Middle East and Africa sans explanation as to what caused the service outage.

But in a later statement, RIM retracted their earlier announcement and stated that the affected area of the service outage spread beyond EMEA and reached India, Argentina, Brazil and Chile.

“The messaging and browsing delays … were caused by a core switch failure within RIM’s infrastructure,” RIM stated. “As a result, a large backlog of data was generated and we are now working to clear that backlog and restore normal service.”

The service outage is now on its third day and consumers aren’t happy with this.  They expressed their frustration on Twitter, making snarky remarks like “What did the one BBM user say to the other? Nothing.”

This could only hasten RIM’s downfall, as more corporations and businesses are now allowing their employees to use other smartphones for corporate use.  The outage has had bad timing, given the other industry issues RIM is currently facing.

To appease angry customers, Etisalat, a UAE telecoms firm, said that they will compensate BlackBerry users for the days they weren’t able to use the service.

“Prepaid customers will receive the equivalent of three days usage, free-of-charge and credited to their account within 24 hours, while for postpaid (contract) customers, this will be adjusted in their monthly bill,” Etisalat said in an emailed statement.

Etisalat chief marketing officer Matthew Willsher added, “Given the exceptional and unprecedented circumstances, we are compensating our BlackBerry users.”