BlackBerry services were restored worldwide yesterday after an embarrassing technical glitch left millions of users without e-mail and messaging for almost four days, the smartphone’s maker said yesterday.

“All of the services are back up globally,” Research in Motion (RIM) founder and co-chief executive Mike Lazaridis told a press conference. “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 experience.”

“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.”

RIM said an initial technical failure had prompted a build-up of messages in its network that snowballed around the world, affecting many of the firm’s 70 million subscribers.

The hardware failure reportedly started at the company’s British hub in Slough, a town west of London.

Mr Lazaridis said the company was taking “immediate and aggressive steps,” including with its suppliers responsible for the design and manufacture of the “core switch” blamed for the outage, “to minimise the risk of something of this magnitude happening again”.