RIM explains BlackBerry outages, says it's working on fix
Research In Motion offered a bit of detail Wednesday on what's behind the "service delays" that have struck Europe, the Middle East, Africa, India, parts of South America, Canada, Mexico and the U.S., resulting in massive amounts of undelivered emails to BlackBerry smartphones.
"The messaging delays were caused by a core switch failure within RIM’s infrastructure," the company said in a statement posted to its blog after an impromptu news conference. "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."
RIM said that the outage should not result in any lost emails or BlackBerry Messenger correspondence and offered assurances that the problems weren't the result of any hacking or anything other than its own core switch failure. The Canadian company did not offer a prediction as to when the problems would be resolved.
"You've depended on us for reliable, real-time communications, and right now we're letting you down," said Robin Bienfait, RIM's chief information officer, in a statement. "We are taking this very seriously and have people around the world working around the clock to address this situation."
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Photo: The BlackBerry Bold 9930, left, Torch 9850 and Torch 9810. Credit: Eric Risberg / Associated Press
