( CNN ) -- Here 's a little secret BlackBerry does n't want you to know : . It would be technically impossible for all Android phones or iPhones to experience a global four-day outage like the one BlackBerry saw this week , according to mobile communications experts . Why ? The answer is in the technical details of how Research in Motion -- the company that makes BlackBerry smartphones , with their click-clacking keyboards and tie-wearing owners -- handles e-mails and text messages . Here 's the gist : RIM acts as a middleman for all e-mail and BlackBerry text messages . It picks up messages from the wireless carrier and passes them on to the recipient . Androids and iPhones do n't have a middleman for texts and e-mail . It 's this BlackBerry baton-passing system that went down Monday , killing or slowing e-mail and texting services for millions of people in Europe , North America , South America , Asia , the Middle East and Africa . The ordeal lasted four days . `` It 's because of the way RIM has set up the ( network ) architecture that is the downfall when it comes to these types of outages , '' said Sean Armstrong , who manages wireless communications at a large tech company . `` When it 's working fine , it 's a great system . When it 's not working fine , it 's a failure . '' This week , it 's fair to say the system was a big ol ' failure . On social media sites , some BlackBerry users said they were so upset about the outage -- the largest in the company 's history -- that they were switching to Apple iOS and Google Android devices . And customer satisfaction with BlackBerry already was low . `` Add up every other thing we 've ever written about why BlackBerry is dying , '' wrote the tech blog Gizmodo . `` This is worse . '' This is not to say that Androids and iPhones never experience network outages . But they would n't be global . And they would be the responsibility of a particular wireless carrier -- AT & T , Sprint , Verizon and T-Mobile -- or a particular messaging system , like Gmail , Hotmail or iMessage , Apple 's new in-house messaging service . Not the maker of the phone . That makes their problems inherently more localized . `` All the stuff goes through them for some form or fashion , '' Nan Palmero , a writer for the site BlackBerryCool.com , said of the way BlackBerry handles messages and e-mail . That makes it possible , he said , for the global BlackBerry network to crash , which would n't be the case for iPhones or Androids . RIM , however , takes issue with this analysis . `` I would not characterize that as fair , '' RIM 's co-CEO Mike Lazaridis said at a Thursday news conference . `` We run a global , secure-push environment that provides the kind of instant messaging that 's made BlackBerry so compelling and so valuable . '' RIM filters e-mails and BlackBerry messages through its own server farms -- giant warehouses full of computers -- for security reasons , said Armstrong . The company scrambles messages , making them more difficult to intercept . That 's won BlackBerry big fans in the business world . The system also uses less battery power because RIM handles much of the computation work , Armstrong said . `` The process for checking your e-mail with a BlackBerry is done by the RIM servers , '' he said . `` So RIM is going to handle all the heavy lifting of going to your inbox and looking for new e-mail , and if it finds new e-mail , it 's going to push it back your devices . '' It also creates the risk of a global crash . But maybe that 's not a completely bad thing . `` For two years , we have n't had a huge issue like this , '' Armstrong said . `` It 's just been little bumps along the way . So I do n't really see ( the middle-man system ) as a weakness . I see it as expected , because no system can be faultless . '' Rich Miller , who runs the industry blog Data Center Knowledge , said it 's clear BlackBerry was unprepared for a failure like the one that began on Monday . `` From what we can see from this outage , it appears RIM does n't have the infrastructure or the process in place to handle a failure properly when it happens and then to recover from it once it 's got a backlog of e-mail in its pipes , '' he said . RIM has said this week 's outage was caused by a failure at one of its messaging servers in Europe , along with the subsequent failure of its backup system . Mike Gikas , a senior editor for technology at Consumer Reports , said problems like the one BlackBerry had this week could actually become more common because people are storing more of their data -- from photos to music and documents -- in the cloud , meaning on remote computer servers rather than at home . `` If these services ever get disrupted , that could just mean a lot of unhappy customers , '' he said . `` More and more of our stuff is stored on remote servers , and there 's increasing burden on the networks to have them available 24/7 . '' As the BlackBerry outage shows , he said , not all of them are ready .
Experts : iPhones and Android devices will not see a global messaging crash . BlackBerry filters messages through its own servers ; Apple and Google do n't . BlackBerry 's middle-man approach to messaging is what crashed this week . Millions of BlackBerry users were without e-mail service for more than three days .