BlackBerry Service Restored With More 'Instability' Possible; RIM Founder Apologizes
Research in Motion’s BlackBerry services are "operating well" after a global outage, according to a statement on the company’s website. RIM’s founder, Mike Lazaridis, apologized for the mess in a video published Thursday.
Millions of BlackBerry device users in Europe, the Middle East and Africa – the EMEA region – were without Web access, email and messaging capabilities Monday following a power outage that impacted server systems in the United Kingdom. On Tuesday, the service disruptions occurred again, this time also disrupting the service of some users in India and three South American countries. Outages reached North and South America Wednesday.
According to RIM’s update Thursday, "BlackBerry services are operating well globally" and "BlackBerry Support teams continue to monitor the situation around the clock to ensure ongoing service stability."
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Lazaridis was apologetic in a video published on RIM's website Thursday.
"Since launching BlackBerry in 1999, it’s been my goal to provide reliable, real-time communication around the world," he said. "We did not deliver on that goal this week. Not even close. I apologize for the service outages this week. We’ve let many of you down. But let me assure you that we are working around the clock to fix this."
He added that it is too soon to say that the issue has been fully resolved. "We expect to see continued progress and possibly some instability as the system comes back to normal service levels everywhere," Lazaridis said.
Lazaridis noted that the company is approaching "normal BlackBerry service level" in Europe, Middle East, India and Africa.
Some customers in Canada and Latin America who are sending messages to other regions may see “intermittent message delays,” according to the website. The note assures that support teams are actively addressing the issue.
"We continue to monitor the system very closely," Lazaridis assured BlackBerry users in the video.
Wednesday, RIM published a statement acknowledging the mobile giant’s fiasco:
“Many of our customers have unfortunately been experiencing service delays this week. We apologize for the inconvenience and we want to assure you that restoring normal service is our number one priority. The messaging delays 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 messaging data was generated. We continue to work toward restoring normal service as quickly as possible.”
