Research in Motion on Wednesday ruled out the possibility that its current service issues are the result of a hack, and said that any lingering message or email delays are likely due to a backlog that has built up since the initial Monday failure.
"I know there's often speculation in these types of situations about a potential breach or hack as the cause, but we've seen no evidence to believe that this is the case," David Yach, RIM's CTO for software, said in a conference call with reporters.
BlackBerry users in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, India, Brazil, Chile, and Argentina have been experiencing email and message delays, as well as complete outages, since Monday, a problem that spread to North America today.
Last night, RIM said the ongoing problems were caused by a core switch failure inside its network.
"As a result, a large backlog of messages has been generated," Yach said today. "We've had to throttle traffic as we process this substantial backlog of messages in a controlled manner. This is why we're seeing ongoing issues and why we're seeing impact to other regions around the world."
As a result, delays and other service issues in North America are the result of that backlog rather than an additional system failure. "It's taken us time to get Europe back to a stable situation, [and] that's caused, we believe, some impact in the other geographies with messages that were bound for Europe."
Yach said RIM has not throttled any other regions beyond Europe, "but as you can imagine, with the global reach of BlackBerry and 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 in the other system."
At this point, RIM still plans to deliver all backlogged messages. "We will not be dropping any email messages," he said.
Meanwhile, while RIM believes it knows what caused Monday's outage, the company "will need to conduct a much deeper analysis once the systems are stabilized in order to make a definitive determination."