Blackberry service issues by RIM have reportedly spread to users throughout North America. The service outages as reported here, first affected the Middle East, Europe and Africa. Going into its third day of disruption, the services were reportedly being restored at one point as reported by the company. RIM had gone so far as to report that its services were restored less than 24 hours ago.

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.
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..

The fact that services are still affected and now seem to be spreading could indicate any number of issues. The RIM statement seems to allude to a hardware failure assuming the mention of the core switch is a physical switch indeed. Since that is supposedly now eliminated, the pressure is on to find, isolate and repair the underlying issue at hand at this point. It also indicates a failure in their backup systems, which apparently are tested on some basis, but have failed in production.

It will be interesting to review what the final postmortem on this issue will be. It appears that at this time, without a confirmed restoral of services in sight and continued issues that this unprecedented sustained collapse on delivery of services will impact this company greatly at a minimum. The failure of backup infrastructure is a very suspicious element as well and whatever happens, the industry will be looking to analyzing this failure for their own understanding, be it hardware, process, networking, or other systems.