RIM struggles to bring services back on track

The BlackBerry outage entered its fourth day as Research in Motion (RIM) struggled to get services on track. A technical failure on Monday had prompted a build-up of messages within RIM's network, triggering a cascade of problems around the world that affected enterprise, as well as individual subscribers.

While the company did not specify what caused the core switch failure within RIM's infrastructure, it maintained it had people around the world working around the clock to address this situation. "We are watching the system very carefully and while services are almost back to normal across geographies for our customer, we are making sure that everything is back to normal," said Patrick Spence, senior vice-president & managing director (global sales & regional marketing), RIM.

Spence said the initial problems had been fixed, but a message backlog had to be dealt with. He insisted all corporate mails and data stuck with RIM systems and servers would be delivered eventually. "The RIM architecture is such that the data would not stay with us. It would be delivered to corporate and individual users."

Mike Lazaridis, president and founder of Canada-based RIM, used a video message to apologise to the 70 million BlackBerry users worldwide who have been starved of instant access to emails and messaging. An estimated one million BlackBerry users are in India. The company said services in Europe, West Asia, Africa and India were returning to normal, though disruptions remained in the United States and Canada, which first experienced problems on Wednesday, and Latin America.

When quizzed on whether this outage would force RIM to reconsider its centralised architecture to a more local architecture, Spence said, "I am not going to speculate on what we may do in future. Right now, we are committed to getting our service back on track 100 per cent." He added while in India services such as BlackBerry Messenger and the email traffic were back to normal, there were reports of delayed internet access and the company was working to resolve the issue.