OTTAWA, Oct 13: BlackBerry services were restored worldwide on Thursday after an embarrassing technical glitch left millions of users without email and messaging for almost four days, the smartphone’s maker said.

“All of the services are back up globally,” Research in Motion (RIM) founder and co-chief executive Mike Lazaridis told a press conference on Thursday. “We’ve now restored full services.”

Mr Lazaridis apologised to the millions of BlackBerry users in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, India, the United States, Canada, Brazil, Argentina and Chile who were starved of instant access to emails and messaging since Monday.

Speaking on the fourth day of disruptions, which the firm blamed on a backlog of emails caused by an initial technical failure at a facility in Europe, Mr Lazaridis said: “This was unfortunately the largest (outage) we’ve experienced.”

“I want to apologise to all of the BlackBerry customers we’ve let down,” he said. “You expect better of us. I expect better of us. Our inability to quickly fix this has been frustrating.” —AFP