BlackBerry services struggling again but there is no outage, says RIM

BlackBerry users were experiencing delays in some areas yesterday, and RIM said that they were investigating the matter.

"There is no system-wide outage, however we are investigating reports that some users in EMEIA (Europe, Middle East, India, and Africa) have experienced delays," RIM announced in a statement.

The company said in an update later that services were operating normally in EMEIA, but did not provide details of what had caused the problem.

The service issue comes about a month after the company had outages of up to four days across North America, Latin America, and EMEIA.

RIM said last month that the service interruption was caused by a failure of a core switch within its infrastructure. Although the system was designed to failover to a backup switch, the failover did not function as previously tested, creating a large backlog of data that RIM had to clear.

The company faces a possible class action suit in Canada, demanding a refund of users' data plan charges during the outage.

A number of users on Wednesday reported problems with the BlackBerry service. One user said she and four other friends were getting slow responses, particularly on BlackBerry Messenger (BBM). Another user said "BlackBerry is disappointing right now" as BBM wasn't working properly.

The development comes a day after Google said it was pulling the plug on a native Gmail app for BlackBerry. The internet giant said that from November 22 it will end support for the Gmail App for BlackBerry, and has focused its efforts on building Gmail products in the mobile browser.

Users may continue to use the app, if installed, but it will not be supported by Google, or available for download from November 22. BlackBerry users can continue to access Gmail through the mobile web app at gmail.com in their BlackBerry web browser, Google said in a blog post on Tuesday.