Research in Motion CIO, Robin Bienfait, has apologised to Blackberry users after outages continued for a third day running. UPDATE: During a press conference, Mike Lazaridis, co-CEO at Research in Motion (RIM) said the company has now restored full services.
The outage began in Europe two days ago and spread across the globe to North America yesterday.
The messaging and browsing delays experienced by Blackberry users were caused by a combination of a hardware failure and a failure in the dual-redundancy system, causing a "ripple effect" in RIM's infrastructure.
In a letter to customers, Robin Bienfait, CIO at Research in Motion (RIM), said: "You've depended on us for reliable, real-time communications and right now we're letting you down. We are taking this very seriously and have people around the world working around the clock to address this situation. We believe we understand why this happened and we are working to restore normal service levels in all markets as quickly as we can."
The latest service update from RIM said: "In Europe, Middle East, India and Africa, we are seeing a significant increase in service levels. Service levels are also progressing well in the US, Canada and Latin America, and we are seeing increased traffic throughput on most services, although there are still some delays and service levels may still vary."
Nick Dillon, Ovum analyst, said the company faces more important issues than the service disruption.
"These include capitalising on its growth in the consumer market, maintaining its stronghold in the enterprise and updating its software platform to cope with increasing competition from Apple, Android and Window Phone," said Dillon.
"Given that the reputation of the Blackberry service was built on reliability and timeliness, any disruption to its service will undoubtedly impact the perception of the company and its products to a greater extent than its competitors. It is a testament to the success and ubiquity of the Blackberry service how widely this disruption is being felt, both across business and consumer users," he added.
Why Blackberry failed:
-On Monday 10th October, a hardware failure caused a “ripple effect” in our system was due to a dual redundant, high capacity core switch designed to protect the infrastructure failed, which caused the outages and delays. This caused a “cascade failure” in the system.
-The back-up switch didn’t function as intended, led to a back-log and overloaded the systems elsewhere
-RIM has provided 99.97% service level over the last 18 months
-The company isn’t considering making compensation pay-outs at present.
-Blackberry advises users to remove and replace batteries to restore services synchronisation
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