BlackBerry Outages Continue, Reports Say They've Spread To North America

The focus remains on "Europe, the Middle East, Africa and India," where millions of BlackBerry users are without text services for a third straight day, Reuters reports, but there's word now that the problems are also affecting folks in North America.

Canada's CP24 news site reports that "BlackBerry users in Canada have been cut off from their smartphone's messaging, email and Internet services." Some NPR staffers also report that emails they've sent today haven't gotten to their destinations.

Research In Motion, BlackBerry's manufacturer, says a "core switch failure" caused the problems outside the Americas and that it's working on the problem.

The problems have lead to many, many comments on Twitter — including many retweets of this joke:

"What did one BlackBerry user say to the other BlackBerry user?

"Nothing."

And there have been many suggestions to watch this comedy sketch from the BBC.

Update at 11:15 a.m. ET. BlackBerry Apologizes To American Customers:

"BlackBerry subscribers in the Americas may be experiencing intermittent service delays this morning," the company acknowledges in a statement. "We are working to resolve the situation as quickly as possible and we apologize to our customers for any inconvenience."

On its Twitter page, BlackBerry says:

"We're aware many of you are experiencing service delays. Restoring full service is our number 1 priority."

Update at 9:10 a.m. ET. Reuters reports that:

"Research In Motion advised some clients on Wednesday that it was dealing with a BlackBerry outage in the Americas similar to service disruptions that have cropped up in other parts of the world."

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