RIM is sorry – very, very sorry

It’s the news BlackBerry users have been waiting to hear.

Research in Motion says service has now been restored.

The announcement comes after RIM spent days scrambling to clear a backlog caused by the largest outage in the company’s history. BlackBerry emailing, messaging and browsing services were affected across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, along with disruptions affecting users in the U.S. and Canada.

The company says a hardware failure caused a ripple effect in its system when a switch designed to protect its infrastructure failed.

Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis launched a public apology for the lengthy outage. And with the latest iPhone hitting stores tomorrow the company was also quick to point out this could happen to anyone.

Video: Lisa Hepfner reports: