Research in Motion, the embattled BlackBerry maker with 70 million subscribers around the world, on Thursday announced restoring service globally after a core switch designed to protect its infrastructure failed, exasperating many customers who were unable to use email and messaging services for the better part of the week.
In a video and during a press conference Thursday, the company apologized repeatedly for the biggest outage in the 12-year history of BlackBerry and vowed to restore the trust of customers.
“You expect better from us and I expect better from us," RIM Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis asserted.
But Lazaridis seemed to fumble with his words when a reporter from The Globe and Mail asked him why RIM didn’t communicate with the public about the network outage until this morning when the interruptions in service began on Monday.
“I was very much involved … in the management of the procedures to bring these up and I decided to make that video at the time I did because we had made a lot of progress and I could afford the time to actually produce the video and let our customers know what was happening," he said.
RIM Co-CEO Jim Balsillie was more succinct, indicating that Lazaridis was busy directing the teams responsible for restoring service. “And nobody has gone home since Monday," Balsillie said.
The network failure caused outages and delays throughout the world, including Africa, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, India, the Middle East and North America. Lazaridis explained that a core switch designed to protect RIM’s infrastructure failed, and a backup switch did not operate as intended. But RIM declined to say which vendor was responsible for the failure. One of the executives said the system is engineered with multiple vendors and that it’s premature to discuss the issue until the company does a proper analysis.
