Research In Motion Limited is making internal changes to ensure that a massive outage of its BlackBerry e-mail service like the recent one that hit North American and left business executives, lawyers, politicians and other users without uninterrupted on-the-go e-mail access this week doesn"t happen again. The company has about 8 million subscribers for various models of its BlackBerry device and it plans to add more than a million in the three months ending June 2. Analysts question whether the Waterloo, Ontario-based RIM has enough infrastructure to handle the torrid pace of its growth. The cause of the outage was reportedly a new storage feature that had not been properly tested and evidently RIM"s process to reroute traffic to a backup system did not perform as expected.
"It"s very rare that we have these events. I think it"s pretty likely that the systems are in place that this kind of thing, as incredibly unlikely as it is to happen, is all the more unlikely to happen again. 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. Of course you take action to ensure it doesn"t happen again," co-chief executive Jim Balsillie.