Photo credit: Langleyo/Flickr.

BlackBerry users are today entering into a third day of limited access to their emails, browsing and messaging, even though operating company Research In Motion (RIM) had issued assurances that the problems were solved.

RIM’s servers in Slough, Berkshire, have been blamed for the curtailment to service with a back-up system also failing to “function as previously tested”. At 10pm yesterday the company said it now has to work through a backlog of data before services can be fully resumed. This morning, Twitter users have told The Cloud Circle that they still have limited access.

The first curtailment to emails, browsing and access to the BlackBerry Messaging lasted most of Monday and affected customers across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, with speculation that scalability issues with ‘clunky’ internal infrastructure at the UK datacentre were to blame.

BlackBerry was less than candid about the source of its issues on Monday, but posted an assurance around 9pm that most services were now running smoothly, followed by another at dawn which said all systems were back up and running.

At dawn yesterday the company said all users should be fully operational with emails, browsing and access to the BlackBerry Messaging service again.

But the problems persisted nonetheless with some users reporting a slow service and some none at all. The operator remained similarly tight lipped, only posting updates with words to the effect that it was working at solving the problems.

Then, just before 10pm last night, the company released the following statement:

"RIM update: 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. We apologize for any inconvenience and we will continue to keep you informed."

This morning, Twitter user and friend of The Cloud Circle TobyJClarke, CIO of the Abbey protection Group, tweeted: “It is incredulous that Blackberry Can't get there [sic] act together and restore services. Day 3 of RIM disruption starting now. #BBM”

The Cloud Circle will be attempting to question Research In Motion over its scalability issues and will be happy to assist the company in exploring a range of new technological solutions which will allow for peaks in demand and uptime assurance.