Alan Sugar blasts BlackBerry as service outage enters third day

Millions of BlackBerry users have been left without internet and online services for a third day after Research in Motion struggled to resolve the network problems.

Yesterday morning, BlackBerry owners around the world again reported issues accessing email, internet and BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) only hours after Research in Motion had claimed that a problem at its data centre in Slough had been resolved.

Last night, RIM issued a statement shedding some more light on the problems. It said: "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 apologise for any inconvenience and we will continue to keep you informed."

This morning, an RIM spokesperson confirmed that the fault in the core switch - a piece of equipment which routes traffic inside a data centre - was the cause of the initial problems on Monday.

RIM has attracted criticism for its handling of the ongoing problems, with users flooding message boards and Twitter to express their dissatisfaction at the situation.

Writing on the BlackBerry support forum, someone calling themselves Crossley04 said: "I was just told by Vodafone it could last 48 Hours. I'm looking for an IPhone now this is a joke and beyond.

"RIM sort your selfs out before this gets too much i would like some sort of refund from RIM for this error or fault. Why should we the end user have to pay for not having comms on are mobiles (sic). FIX IT."

Lord Alan Sugar tweeted: "In all my years in IT biz, I have never seen such a outage as experienced by BlackBerry. I can't understand why it's taking so long to fix.

"All my companies use [BlackBerry phones], every one so reliant on getting email on the move, people don't know if they are coming or going."

Former Downing Street communications chief Alastair Campbell also criticised RIM for the lack of information supplied to customers while it addressed the problems.

"Explain while you fix. Apologise when you have. Recompense after. Handling so far woeful," he tweeted.

The network problems heap pressure on RIM, which is being viewed as increasingly vulnerable after recently reporting a dismal set of quarterly results.

BlackBerry is also facing increased competition from rival Apple and its new iOS 5 operating system, which launched today with iMessage, a key competitor to BBM.

Ian Fogg, an analyst at Forrester Research, said RIM must work hard to rebuild its reputation or risk losing some of its 70m subscribers worldwide.

"RIM is in danger of becoming its own worst enemy if it is unable to reliably operate the communication services that have differentiated it," he said on his blog.

"BBM is the reason many young consumers stay with BlackBerry. If it doesn't work, they will leave RIM."

He added: "For RIM, the services that are down today are precisely those with which it differentiates its consumer offerings."