Blackberry"s online outages are continuing for a fourth straight day in some parts of the world. The problems are getting so bad that Research in Motion"s founder and co-CEO Mike Lazaridis has taken to YouTube to personally apologize to Blackberry"s customers. The video, which you can see below, has Lazaridis admitting, "We"ve let many of you down." But even with this humble message, there"s still no word on when these problems will finally be fixed. All Lazaridis would say is, "It"s too soon to say that this issue is fully resolved." However he added, "We are working around the clock to fix this."
The outages that have affected Blackberry"s online services such as email, text messaging and web browsing began on Monday in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. The problems spread to South America later in the week and on Wednesday finally reached North American Blackberry customers. RIM has now said that North and South America should be back online but outages continue in other parts of the world.
In related news, Microsoft has decided to jump in and take advantage of RIM and Blackberry"s problems. A Twitter message from Microsoft Phone"s Ben Rudolph late on Wednesday said, "DearBlackberry users, Frustrated with your BB? Tell me why you want to upgrade to a windowsphone - I"ve got 25 to give away." Indeed, this move could be a prelude of Blackberry customers who might jump ship to Windows Phone, the iPhone and Android-based devices as a result of this week"s outages.