Research in Motion (RIM), the maker of popular BlackBerry family of smartphones, has apologized to its users around the world for a prolonged outage in its services.

The service disruptions are now in its third day and might spread to the US servers, which is the biggest market for the company. The company said that the disruption in services, which affected users from Europe to Latin America, was caused directly by issues in its won support systems. It explained that a transfer to a backup system did not happen as it was tested to be and thus users were unable to access services.

The problems first started affecting BlackBerry services first occurred Monday morning and continued for days. The company only came out with a statement now to explain the problem. BlackBerry users in various countries in Europe, the Middle East and Africa as well as those in India, Brazil, Chile, and Argentina faced issues while communicating with others. The company had first said on Tuesday morning that the issue has been resolved and the services are restored by it later acknowledged that t issues continued into Tuesday.

“We are taking this very seriously and have people around the world working around the clock to address this situation. We believe we understand why this happened and we are working to restore normal service levels in all markets as quickly as we can,” Chief Information Officer Robin Bienfait said in a statement.

RIM is now investigating reports of delays in the BlackBerry Messenger service in the U. S., Canada and Latin America and internet browsing is not accessible for users in Europe, Middle East, India and Africa.

The outage has dented the company’s reputation, which was until now known for the reliability and security in providing services to its users.