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Smartphone maker, Research In Motion (RIM) faces user revolt after millions of users in Europe, the Middle East and Africa(EMEA) suffered a second day without BlackBerry services such as Messenger (BBM) and Internet on Tuesday.

To add to the woes, the problem has not only persisted but even spread further to South America, with users in Brazil, Chile and Argentina suffering loss of services.

The outage follows one that began on Monday morning at about 11am BST and lasted until late in the afternoon. RIM had indicated that the problem was fixed, but on Tuesday morning BlackBerry users discovered they had once again lost service, with limited access to emails, web browsing and secure services such as BBM.

Though the teams believed it had been fixed on Monday and even confirmed the news but to everyone’s dismay, the problem reappeared on Tuesday, effectively disabling the network operations centre.

As the company struggled with interruptions at its hub in Slough, Berkshire, more than 70 million subscribers of BlackBerry services around the world were left stranded at the mercy of RIM which suffered another blow to its reputation.

The already irritated users’ reaction on social networks and suggested their moving to other platforms, such as Android phones or Apple's iPhone, which are not reliant on RIM's centralised service for connectivity.

In a statement released at 2200 BST in the UK on Tuesday, RIM said that the messaging and browsing del ays being experienced by BlackBerry users in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, India, Brazil, Chile and Argentina were caused by a core switch failure within RIM's infrastructure. Although the system is designed to failover to a back-up switch, the failover did not function as previously tested. As a result, a large backlog of data was generated and we are now working to clear that backlog and restore normal service as quickly as possible. They further apologized for the inconvenience and assured to keep the users informed.

Any loss of customers in the EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) region would be a serious problem for RIM, which has been losing market share in North America, traditionally one of its strongest markets, to phones running Google's Android mobile operating system and to Apple's iPhone. In the US, RIM had reported lost 4.3 million users in the past year which it was trying to balance by expansion in EMEA and regions such as India.