IM says BlackBerry services fully restored
Posted Oct 13, 2011 7:29 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Research in Motion said BlackBerry services have now been fully restored.
RIM said it worked around the clock to clear backlogged e-mail messages stuck in its system after the largest Blackberry outage ever.
The widespread outage in Canada and the U.S. and started Monday.
Users were without e-mail, texting and BBM (BlackBerry messaging), sparking a flurry of complaints on Twitter.
RIM said a “core switch failure” in Europe caused the global service outages and that the original outage caused a backlog of messages, which then spread around the world.
In a conference call, RIM CEO Mike Lazaridis apologized and offered an explanation for the outage.
“A dual-redundant, high-capacity core switch designed to protect the infrastructure failed and caused outages and delays for some customers in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, India, Brazil, Chile and Argentina. This caused a cascade failure in our system,” Lazaridis said.
He was joined by co-CEO Jim Balsillie, who said the company is now looking at a way to compensate its clients.
Balsillie also said the outage had nothing to do with RIM caling back its workforce. The company recently cut more than 2,000 jobs.
CTO for software for RIM, David Yach, said there were backup systems in place but they failed to kick in.
The same outage hit Europe, the Middle East, parts of Asia and South America over the long weekend.
Duncan Stewart, director of research at Deloitte Canada said although the outage is annoying, it is not necessarily a major black eye for RIM.
“It’s much easier to write a story about another thing going wrong with Blackberry. That doesn’t mean their outages are more severe or worse than other carriers,” Stewart explained.
