BlackBerry services are finally operating well globally. RIM said that BlackBerry Support teams continue to monitor the situation around the clock to ensure ongoing service stability.

Some users in Canada and Latin America who are sending messages to other regions may see intermittent message delays, although RIM's Support teams are actively addressing this, the company added.

Research in Motion founder and Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis apologized to millions of customers hit by three days of global BlackBerry service outages.

Lazaridis acknowledged that he could not predict the timing of a full global recovery, and for the first time referred to the worldwide BlackBerry problems as "outages." Many prior communications from other RIM offiicials called the problems "service interruptions" or "delays."

"I apologize for the service outages this week," Lazaridis said in a video clip posted at 6:20 a.m. EDT Thursday on the company's website. "We've let many of you down. But let me assure you we are working around the clock to fix this. You expect better from us and I expect better from us."

Original story

Research In Motion's BlackBerry services across Europe, the Middle East, Africa and India have improved significantly, the company said on Thursday, after a three-day global service disruption.

"In Europe, Middle East, India and Africa, we are seeing a significant increase in service levels. Service levels are also progressing well in the U.S., Canada and Latin America and we are seeing increased traffic throughput on most services, although there are still some delays and services levels may still vary amongst customers. Our global teams are continuing to work as quickly as possible to restore full and consistent service across all regions," RIM said in an update on its website.

The messaging delays were caused by a core switch failure within RIM's infrastructure, the company explained.

"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 messaging data was generated," the company said. "We continue to work toward restoring normal service as quickly as possible."

RIM said that the outage should not result in any lost emails or BlackBerry Messenger correspondence and offered assurances that the problems weren't the result of any hacking or anything other than its own core switch failure.

In another development, RIM has also warned users to ignore a hoax chain message that has been doing the rounds among some BBM users. The message tells users to re-send the message, warning that if they don't, their account would remain disabled and all contacts would be erased.

RIM told users to ignore the message and not to forward it.