According to Canada’s Research in Motion, this week’s massive failure in the company’s BlackBerry wireless email service was caused by the introduction of a new feature designed to use temporary storage on BlackBerry devices more efficiently. Instead, the change “triggered a compounding series of interaction errors between the system’s operational database and cache,” the company said in a preliminary statement to news outlets.
RIM describes the new cache optimization routine as “non-critical,” but says testing of the change “proved to be insufficient” and did not reveal the impact the change would have on the BlackBerry infrastructure. Furthermore, RIM says its failover process to transition to backup systems “did not fully perform to RIM’s expectation,” creating more delay in restoring service and clearing queued messages.
In issuing a preliminary statement, RIM appears to be trying to clear the uncertainty hanging over its famously addictive wireless email service since its sudden failure earlier this week. RIM’s silence on the cause of the problems led to widespread speculation in the technology community, with theories seeming to get more outlandish by the hour. Common conjectures attributed the error to insufficient network capacity, or to a fundamental security breach at RIM.
RIM characterizes its handling of the outage of calm and cool: “Proper analysis can take several days or longer and RIM’s commitment is to provide the most accurate and complete information possible in such situations.”
