Video: BlackBerry Issues Apology For Service Problems [Updated]

[Update, Oct.13, 9:15 a.m. PDT |BlackBerry phones back to normal Thursday morning after a three day outage, company reps said.

Research in Motion Ltd. (RIM),  the Canadian company that create the phones, released a statement Thursday morning, stating:

"BlackBerry services are operating well globally. BlackBerry Support teams continue to monitor the situation around the clock to ensure ongoing service stability. Some customers in Canada and Latin America who are sending messages to other regions may see intermittent message delays. Support teams are actively addressing this."

Mike Lazaridis, founder of RIM, appeared in a YouTube video Thursday morning apologizing to its users:

BlackBerry users around the world, including Americans, were experiencing difficulties with their smartphones, including outage of email, messaging and Internet services on the phones.

BlackBerry users in Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa started experiencing difficulties and delays on Monday. Reports of outages in North America began on Wednesday.

[Update, Oct. 12, 5:10 p.m. PDT | RIM released an apology Wednesday afternoon, stating:

"You've depended on us for reliable, real-time communications, and right now we're letting you down. We are taking this very seriously and have people around the world working around the clock to address this situation. We believe we understand why this happened and we are working to restore normal service levels in all markets as quickly as we can."

The statement contained updates for the Europe, Middle East, Indea and Africa (EMEIA) service region, Canada and Latin America service region and the United States service area.

For the U.S., RIM announced the following that e-mail systems are operating, and the company is clearing backlogged messages. Capacity has been added to interregional and intercontinental message delivery, BBM and browsing services are online and support teams are investigating reports of delays.

The statement concluded: "We are doing everything in our power to restore regular service everywhere and to restoer your trust in us."]

On Tuesday, RIM reported that a crucial link in its infrastrucutre had failed, and therefore outages were happening outside of North America. When they tried, a backup version of the link didn't work either.They said they are now working to get through a backlog of traffic that began Monday.

RIM has yet to explain why North American Blackberry users are experiencing problems. RIM is posting updates on its BlackBerry Service Update page.

"We know that many of you are still experiencing service problems," the RIM website states. "The resolution of this service issue is our Number One priority right now and we are working night and day to restore all BlackBerry services to normal levels. We will continue to keep this page updated."

This is the longest outage RIM has experienced in years.

This outage comes at a time when it's competitor, Apple, is launching the iPhone4S with iOS 5 and iCloud software.