MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) – Research in Motion (RIM) is still trying to correct a worldwide outage affecting BlackBerry cell phone users.

The company, which makes the phone and operates the worldwide BlackBerry network, said the problem started early Monday morning in Europe and then spread to the United States on Wednesday. It has been going on for days overseas, affecting millions of customers around the world.

People have had had trouble getting email, messages, and using the Internet.

On Thursday, the owner of BlackBerry said service is improving but it’s going to take a bit before service is back to normal.

According to a company spokesperson, a system failure caused the problem, and then the backup failed which added to the delay.

“We understand the frustration our customers are feeling about the lack of BlackBerry service, so our priority here is make sure that that network is up and running as soon as possible,” said Stephen Bates, the managing director of RIM UK.

The technology trouble left many people frustrated.

“Having trouble sending, having trouble receiving, sent five or six BlackBerry messages and they just didn’t get through,” said Brian Feuer, a BlackBerry user.

The complaints have been taken to social media outlets, too. On Thursday morning it appeared as if there were still people having trouble as they ranted with posts on Twitter and Facebook.

This is BlackBerry’s biggest outage in years. Business analysts said the company could lose customers over it.