A disruption that has been going on for three days now has spread from Europe and the Middle East to North America today, as users are experiencing problems with many BlackBerry services.

On Monday, European, Middle Eastern and African users began to experience spotty functionality of email, internet browsing and BlackBerry messaging services. It appears that those problems have jumped the pond.

Last night, RIM gave this explanation to users –

The messaging and browsing delays that some of you are still experiencing 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 sincerely apologise for the inconvenience caused to many of you and we will continue to keep you informed.

And today they acknowledge that BlackBerry users in the Americas are now feeling the outage –

BlackBerry subscribers in the Americas may be experiencing intermittent service delays this morning. We are working to resolve the situation as quickly as possible and we apologize to our customers for any inconvenience. We will provide a further update as soon as more information is available.

BlackBerry users are taking to Twitter to express their frustrations, and “Dear BlackBerry” is a trending topic in the States –

RIM is telling users on Twitter that this is their #1 priority –

Is your BlackBerry experiencing issues? Has this outage made you think a little harder about that big iPhone 4S release on Friday? Let us know in the comments.