RIM on BlackBerry Outage

Research in Motion this afternoon apologized for the outage this week that blocked BlackBerry messages for hours. Company co-leader Jim Balsillie validated earlier reports that the crash was self-inflicted, saying that RIM had 'accidentally' caused the problem and would avoid repeating the mistake.

"There are times when a mistake can happen and you think your processes are designed to handle every eventuality, and every now and then, one doesn't," the executive said. "Of course you take action to ensure it doesn't happen again."

The solution was said to be a series of changes within the company's network structure to make sure it would remain intact in the case of a catastrophic failure. Tuesday's issue was triggered by a flawed upgrade that disabled the system and failed to activate a backup system that would have kept the service active. Balsillie defended the company's relative silence until today, telling reporters that its first priority was full service.

"Do people like this happened? No," he said. "But we're taking it very very seriously and we're supporting our customers."

By Electronista Staff