Research In Motion’s president and co-CEO apologized to users Thursday for the service outages on the Blackberry network since Monday across a large swath of countries including the U.S. and Canada.
The company had not delivered on its goal to provide reliable, real-time communications around the world, said Mike Lazaridis. “Not even close,” he said.
There have been improvements in the service, and the company is approaching normal levels of BlackBerry services in Europe, Middle East, India and Africa, he said.
Lazaridis said he was unable to give a time-frame for the full recovery of the service around the globe. ” It is too soon to say that this issue is fully resolved,” he added.
On Wednesday, RIM said that email systems were operating, and BlackBerry Messenger was online and traffic was passing successfully. Browsing was however not available in Europe, Middle East, India, Africa, and some parts of Latin America.
The company said late Wednesday that it was seeing a significant increase in service levels In Europe, Middle East, India and Africa. “Service levels are also progressing well in the U.S., Canada and Latin America and we are seeing increased traffic throughput on most services, although there are still some delays and services levels may still vary amongst customers,” the company said on its website.
RIM has blamed the outages on a core switch failure within RIM’s infrastructure. 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 data was generated, which the company is now trying to clear.
John Ribeiro covers outsourcing and general technology breaking news from India for The IDG News Service. Follow John on Twitter at @Johnribeiro. John’s e-mail address is john_ribeiro@idg.com