Research in Motion (RIM), the maker of popular BlackBerry family of smartphones, have said that the widespread outage in its Email and messaging services recently were caused by a failure in the core switch.

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. "We are now working to clear that backlog and restore normal service as quickly as possible," it said in a brief statement.

BlackBerry users in various countries in Europe, the Middle East and Africa as well as those in India, Brazil, Chile, and Argentina face issues while communicating with others. The company ha

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.