Research in Motion has admitted that it doesn’t know how long it will take to get its BlackBerry services back to normal.
According to RIM, its services are starting to recover after three days of outages and delays on the network.
But RIM founder and joint CEO Mike Lazaridis said a full recovery could take more time and he warned of further disruption as the network recovers.
“I’d like to give you an estimated time of full recovery around the world, but I can’t do this with certainty,” he said.
“We expect to see steady improvements, and possibly some instability, as the system comes back to normal service levels everywhere.”
The company has faced a public backlash over the way it has handled the system failure – apparently caused by a faulty switch in Slough – but earlier today said the service should be returning to normal.
“From 6am today, all services across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, as well as India, have been operating with significant improvement,” the company said. “We continue to monitor the situation 24×7 to ensure ongoing stability. Thank you for your patience.”
A large backlog has been generated and we’ve had to throttle services while we process this backlog
The company blamed the ongoing and erratic service problems around the globe on a backlog of data created by the switch failure in Slough.
“A large backlog has been generated and we’ve had to throttle services while we process this backlog, which is why we’re seeing ongoing issues and impact on other regions,” said David Yach, chief technology officer for software at Research In Motion, in a conference call.
“RIM’s infrastructure suffered a core switch failure,” said Yach. “They all have redundant switches and are designed to fail over with no impact to services, but in this case the failover did not function as expected, despite the fact that we test.”
The company said it has established the root cause of the outage, but it declined to discuss what happened until it had conducted further testing.
RIM did, however, dismiss rumours of a attack being the cause of the collapse, saying it had “seen no evidence of a hack or attack being the cause”.
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