The UK managing director of RIM, Stephen Bates, has apologised for the service disruption to email browsing and BlackBerry Messenger across Europe. BlackBerry users have experienced network outage for the last few days, a situation that he describes as "not acceptable".

Speaking at the third annual BlackBerry Innovation Forum, and reported by website OneMobileRing, Bates claims that RIM is "working hard around the clock to resolve the issue" and that the company is "not going to stop until they get to the end of the problem".

However, the EMEA-wide issue may still take a while to resolve. In the meantime, Bates states that RIM will keep its customers informed of progress: "We will continue dialogue through carrier partners," he says. And the company will be "doing their best to improve communications, with updates on Twitter and Facebook".

The comments come on the back of an official statement given to Pocket-lint yesterday, which go some way to explain the network problem:

"The messaging and browsing delays 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. 

"We apologise for any inconvenience and we will continue to keep you informed."

Have you been affected by the BlackBerry outage? Let us know in the comments below...

Pic: OneMobileRing