RIM exec gets out in front of BlackBerry crisis

RIM co-chief Mike Lazaridis in a video (below) and update personally apologized for the still recovering BlackBerry service outage. The company was "working tirelessly" to get back users' faith, he said. He wanted to give a repair time but couldn't, and he acknowledged that the company should have done better.

"You expect better from us, and I expect better from us," Lazaridis said.

Both he and an earlier team update had pointed to major improvements across all areas, although the executive left room for some "possible instability" as RIM cleared the backlog of messages triggered by a core switch failure and a bad backup.

The personal response may help assuage frustrations from BlackBerry owners that top management wasn't taking responsibility for an outage that rendered its core product near-useless for almost four days. RIM and its CEOs have often made the centralized nature of BlackBerry service a selling point for its real-time speed, security, and efficiency. The creation of a single point of failure even for basic services like the web and online apps, however, makes any outage that much more severe and has led some to consider switching to an iPhone or Android phone, where such failures are generally unheard of.

By Electronista Staff