RIM's founder and co-CEO Mike Lazaridis
RIM’s founder and co-CEO Mike Lazaridis has appeared on video apologising for the BlackBerry outages. He has since said that services have been fully restored.
The video was posted on BlackBerry’s YouTube channel, where Lazaridis acknowledges the lack of communications from RIM during the service outages.
“Since launching BlackBerry in 1999, it’s been my goal to provide reliable, real-time communications around the globe,” he said.
“We did not deliver on this goal this week – not even close,” said Lazaridis, who added they’ll now keep their website and social networking profiles updated about the situation.
Lazaridis apologised for the service outages, which affected million across the globe. BlackBerry users were unable to access email, internet and BBM services for a number of days.
“We’ve let many of you down. But let me assure you, we’re working around the clock to fix this,” said Lazaridis.
“You expect better from us and I expect better from us,” he said.
Lazaridis said BlackBerry service levels in Europe, the Middle East and Africa were now approaching “normal levels.”
However, he said that while there have been improvements, there could be “some instability” as they bring the system back to normal across the globe.
“I’d like to give you an estimated time for full recovery around the world, but I cannot do this with certainty at this time,” he said.
“For those of you affected, I know that this is very frustrating. We’re doing everything in our power to restore regular service levels and we’re working tirelessly to restore your trust in us,” said Lazaridis.
While Lazaridis did not specify the cause of the issue in this video, it’s believed to be due to a failure within Research in Motion’s own infrastructure. A transition to a backup switch did not go according to plan, causing a large backlog of data.
UPDATE: Engadget reports that Lazaridis said that services were now fully restored globally. Lazaridis confirmed this in a conference call held a little while ago and told BlackBerry users to pull their battery and reboot the phone if services were still not working for them.
