RIM blames European backlog for NA BlackBerry failure, doesn’t say when outage will end

BlackBerry customer worries are reaching a fever pitch after a three-day service outage, so RIM just threw an impromptu press conference to explain itself. Unfortunately, the company didn’t provide any guidance on when we can expect service to be restored, but it did say that a massive backlog of unsent European messages and emails is the reason why the outage has spread this far. "It’s a backlog issue… clearly we’ve got a backlog in Europe based on the initial outage, and then there’s the time it’s taken to stabilize that," the company explained. RIM added that it hasn’t necessarily determined all the root causes of the failure yet, but it has a team working on that as we speak, and in the meanwhile it will throttle traffic as necessary to allow the backlog of emails and messages to clear.

Deleting all that unsent data might be a quicker short-term solution, but RIM says it won’t do that. "No, all of the email will be delivered," it said in response to such a question. "We will not be dropping any messages." We'll continue to monitor the situation in this stream, and you can follow this link for official RIM updates.