BlackBerry Outage Hits U.S., Comes at Bad Time

Research in Motion is quietly becoming the Netflix of the mobile industry.

The Canadian BlackBerry-maker, who also has a strong presence in Redwood City, is struggling through a messaging and email service outage that has frustrated users in Asia, Europe, Latin American and Africa.

Now the company has confirmed that that three-day disruption has spread to North America.

"The messaging and browsing delays ... were caused by a core switch failure within RIM's infrastructure," the company said in a statement Tuesday. "As a result, a large backlog of data was generated and we are now working to clear that backlog and restore normal service."

RIM has advised customers to be patient as it continues to work through the troubles.

But the timing of the outage could not be worse as the Canadian phone-maker is already struggling with an invasion by Android and Apple on its market share.

The Apple iPhone 4S went on sale this week and already sold out before the smartphone even hit stores.

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