Blackberry"s customers around the world are hopefully breathing a sigh of relief today. News.com reports that according to Blackberry"s owner Research in Motion, the online services are now back in operation in all parts of the world. This should end a series of outages that affected nearly all of Blackberry owners around the world during the past few days. RIM"s co-CEOs Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie said that all online services were restored earlier this morning.
The outages that crippled Blackberry"s email, text messaging and web browsing features were caused by the hardware failure of a core switch in the online infrastructure. In addition, the core switch"s back up didn"t work and caused the outages to spread around the world, including here in North America. Lazaridis said RIM doesn"t know yet what caused the switch and its back up to fail. He also wouldn"t say which company made the core switch.
One of the things that makes Blackberry"s online service attractive to businesses is part of the reason for its failure. All of the online traffic goes through Blackberry"s pipes which in theory should make using it more secure than other more open ended systems. On the other hand, if a hardware failure such as the one that hit the service this week happens, it also takes out more of the online service than if a hardware issue happened with a more open online system.
So far RIM has yet to say if it will offer compensation to Blackberry customers for the extended online downtime. However, Lazaridis said they do want to regain the trust of its 70 million subscribers, saying, "That"s something we will turn our attention to now. We plan to come to customers on this and make things right with them."