Text, Email Backlog Blamed for BlackBerry Outage

The BlackBerry service outage that has spread worldwide and annoyed millions of users started with the failure of a link in Research In Motion's European infrastructure, the Blackberry maker says. The back-up system also failed, and the subsequent backlog of European texts and emails caused the outage to spread to North America. RIM is "working around the clock" to fix the problem, and no messages have been lost forever, says spokesmen.

RIM officials say they're certain that the outage was the result of an "extremely critical" network failure instead of sabotage or hacking. "We're putting all of our focus with all of our engineers and all of our network specialists on trying to understand the nature of why this backup system didn't work as it should have," an RIM exec tells CNN. (More BlackBerry stories.)