RIM trying to ensure BlackBerry outages never happen again

Top executives from BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion Ltd. apologized Thursday for three days of data disruptions on the company’s secure data delivery system, telling investors they were working to ensure the problem does not happen again. “I want to apologize to all of the BlackBerry customers we’ve let down ... You expect better of us, I expect better of us. Our inability to quickly fix this has been frustrating,” Michael Lazaridis, RIM president and co-CEO, said during introductory remarks on a worldwide press and investor conference call Thursday morning. “You should know that we are taking immediate and aggressive steps to minimize the chances of this happening again.” Lazaridis and co-CEO Jim Balsillie said the worldwide BlackBerry problems started Monday when a “dual-redundant core switch” failed in the company’s U.K. facilities, causing outages and delays for customers in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, India, and parts of South America. By Wednesday, those delays had led to a backlog of data transmissions in RIM’s network, slowing down and disrupting services to other BlackBerry users around the globe in what Lazaridis described as the largest outage the company has ever experienced. All services were restored early morning Thursday, and the company was working to transmit the remaining queued messages, Balsillie said. RIM’s website noted that users in Canada and Latin America may still experience “intermittent message delays” when sending messages to other regions. “Support teams are actively addressing this issue,” a post at 9 a.m. Thursday said on the company’s BlackBerry service update webpage. Over the coming weeks and months, RIM will work with its vendors to identify and correct the issue that led to the initial switch failure, Lazaridis said. The company will also audit its network infrastructure and conduct a “root analysis” of the failed system and why it took so long to restore services. “Most of all, we’re committed to restoring the trust of our loyal BlackBerry customers that we’ve worked so hard to earn over the years,” Lazaridis said. Those customer relations efforts will involve using social media outlets like Twitter to respond to customer complaints and dissatisfaction, the executives said. They did not say whether RIM will compensate cellphone carriers who were forced to repay customers for lost services. news@thewirereport.ca

RIM trying to ensure BlackBerry outages never happen again

News | 10/13/2011 7:54 pm EDT

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