RIM co-CEO apologizes for BlackBerry outages

Around the world, and now in the United States, BlackBerry services have been going out for millions of users since Oct. 9. The problem, RIM says, is a “core switch failure” and cascading failures and backlog that have clogged up their system, delaying email and BlackBerry Messenger service for most users. In the last day or so, RIM has gotten around to making apologies and better explaining what’s going on. Today, in a YouTube message, RIM founder and co-CEO Mike Lazaridis apologized and explained RIM’s progress, but says he cannot give a timeline as to when service will be restored for all. 

“Since launching BlackBerry in 1999, it’s been my goal to provide reliable real time communications around the world,” said Lazaridis. “We did not deliver on that goal this week–not even close. I apologize for the service outages this week. We’ve let many of you down, but let me assure you that we’re working around the clock to fix this. You expect better from us, and I expect better from us. It’s too soon to say that this issue is fully resolved.”

Lazaridis continued on to say that BlackBerry service levels in India, Africa, Europe, and the Middle East are almost back to normal, but instability will continue until this issue is fully resolved. 

For those of you BlackBerry users who aren’t happy, Microsoft is having a field day with the outages, offering 25 BB users free Windows Phones.