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Originally Posted by Dubdub
Research In Motion held a press conference this afternoon to address the service problems it is currently experiencing in regions around the globe. As it stated earlier, the problem occurred when a core switch failed and then that switch's back-up failed. RIM reiterated that the problems have nothing to do with a hack or any sort of attack. The switch failures created an intense backlog of messages and data requests, and RIM has had to throttle back BlackBerry data traffic as it processes the backlogged messages.
The company assured media that fixing the problem is the company's top priority. RIM said that it is still analyzing why the core switch failed, and why its back-up switch failed. RIM said that some customers are seeing no problems, some are seeing delays in the delivery of emails and BlackBerry Messenger messages, and some are seeing total loss of BlackBerry-specific services. RIM did not provide any sort of timeframe for when users can expect to see full service restored.
RIM CTO David Yach responded to questions during a press conference this afternoon, explaining the original cause of the outage (that UK server failure, along with a series of failed redundancies), and how that grew into the global outage we're experiencing now:
"It's a backlog issue. Clearly we have a backlog in Europe, based on the initial outage and the time it's taken to stabilize that. At this point, we have not throttled the other regions, but as you can imagine, with the global reach of BlackBerry, people using it to contact others around the world, there's a lot of messages coming to Europe from Asia and the Americas, and those would be backed up on the other system. It's looking like over time that backlog built, and started impacting those other systems."
The obvious solution would be to clear the backlog and restore service, but in doing so, RIM would purge any undelivered messages. Yach said that all emails will eventually be delivered, however, so you shouldn't have anything to worry about there (there was no related comment regarding BBM messages). When asked what the company would be doing to "make right" by way of its customers, Yach emphasized that his focus was only on restoring service at this point, and made no promises of restitution.
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Press conference is online at
Research In Motion Ltd. - BlackBerry Service Update Press Conference