Cause Of BlackBerry Outage Found

An upgrade of a data-routing system left North American customers without e-mail service for several hours.

It should have been a perfectly routine upgrade of a data-routing system for RIM, the makers of the BlackBerry phone. But,Reuters reports, something went wrong, and frantic customers across North America were left without e-mail service for several hours of Monday.   Thecompany has about 12 million subscribers, and needed to upgrade its capacity to handle all the traffic. Once the problem had been identified it was easy to remedy, the company claimed.  

In a statement, the company said,

"RIM’s early investigation… points to a problem with an internal data-routing system within the BlackBerry service infrastructure that had been recently upgraded. The upgrade was part of RIM’s routine and ongoing efforts to increase overall capacity for longer-term growth…No messages were lost, and the system continues to operate normally today."

When RIM experienced its last major outage, in April last year, a new, untested storage system was found to be at fault.