Blackberry CEO Apologizes For Outage

UPDATE: Research In Motion (RIM) now says that Blackberry services have been fully restored, nearly four days after the network began to go down in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. The problem did not appear in North America until Wednesday. RIM blamed the problem on a hardware failure in its network infrastructure.

Research In Motion (RIM), maker of the Blackberry and operator of the world-wide Blackberry network, says the global service interruptions this week are being addressed, with steady for slow progress being made.

RIM founder and co-CEO Mike Lazaridis appeared in a YouTube video today to give customers an update and an apology. In the video, Lazaridis said progress is being made restoring the network but he couldn't give an estimated time for full recovery.

The Blackberry outage began Monday in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. By Tuesday is was affecting most Latin American countries. By Wednesday the problem had spread to North America.

The outage mostly affects instant messaging and web browsing features of the device.