Research In Motion (NASDAQ: RIMM) has had a tough week, as BlackBerry users around the world found themselves without instant messaging and browsing services for days. RIM said on Tuesday that a core switch and failover system failures first affected users in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. By Wednesday, the troubles had spread to the United States and Canada, reports Zack Whittaker at ZDNet.

Social networks ignited with BlackBerry users' anger and threats to defect to other smartphones. The Europe/Middle East/Africa region remains a key one for RIM, and the loss of customers there would be a big problem for the company as it steadily loses customers in the United States to rival devices, notes Charles Arthur at The Guardian. RIM's attempt to expand outside of the United States is being challenged by the less expensive Android devices.

The timing of this outage is especially bad for RIM, coming just days before the launch of Apple's (NASDAQ: AAPL) iPhone 4S.

UPDATE 10/13: RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis releases video apologizing for BlackBerry outage.

For more, see:
- Zack Whittaker's post at ZDNet
- Charles Arthur's article at The Guardian

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