RIM says BlackBerry service restored after worst blackout ever
 

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Research In Motion Ltd. officials are saying BlackBerry service has been restored around the world after the worst service outage in the history of Canada’s largest technology company.

On a Thursday morning conference call with reporters, RIM co-chief executives Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis said the company has solved the underlying issues which caused a BlackBerry blackout for millions of users and that the Waterloo, Ont.-based firm is taking “aggressive steps” to ensure the problem doesn’t reoccur.

“We’re taking immediate and aggressive steps to minimize risks of this happening again,” Mr. Lazaridis said.

This week’s service disruption was the worst BlackBerry outage in the history of the company, Mr. Lazaridis said.

RIM said that BlackBerry service has been restored to all areas, however, some users may still be experiencing some lag in receiving their messages as the company works to send through the backlog of messages.

RIM officials said the system disruption occurred on Monday and was the result of a failure of a core switch inside its European operations. When that system went down, it caused a chain reaction that caused messages to flow to other network operating centres of RIM’s network, which overwhelmed those other centres. Although there were several failsafe measures in place to prevent the cascade failure, Mr. Lazaridis said the backup systems did not function properly.

Mr. Lazaridis said the company now plans to audit its technology infrastructure to figure out what went wrong. RIM also plans to begin working with its carrier partners to come up with back up solutions to prevent a similar incident from happening in the future.

Mr. Lazaridis also shrugged off questions that RIM’s recent round of layoffs — the largest in the history of the company, which saw RIM dismiss nearly 10% of its global workforce –had anything to do with the service disruption.

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