Research in Motion co-founder Mike Lazaridis today apologized for the ongoing BlackBerry outage and said that the company has "restored full services."
"Since launching BlackBerry in 1999, it's been my goal to provide reliable, real-time communications around the world. We did not deliver on that goal this week, not even close," Lazaridis said in a video message (below). "I apologize for the service outages this week. We've let many of you down."
In that message, he also said service was "approaching normal," but in a later conference call with reporters, Lazaridis said services have now been restored. He reiterated that the three-day outage was caused by a hardware failure that prompted a "ripple effect" in RIM's systems. Getting things back up "took much longer than we had expected," and RIM is now "taking immediate and aggressive steps" to prevent such an outage from ever happening again, he said.
That includes working with its vendors to correct the failure that took down its systems. When asked what company produced the faulty product, Lazaridis said RIM works with multiple vendors and "until we have a root cause ... it's premature" to name names.
At this point, RIM has been focused solely on getting its systems back online, but now that is complete, the company will start considering what type of apology perks it might provide to existing customers, said co-CEO Jim Basillie.
"Nobody's gone home since Monday," Balsillie said.
Lazaridis acknowledged that this was the largest outage RIM's BlackBerry service has ever experienced, calling it "unfortunate."
When asked about the possibility of users ditching RIM, Lazaridis said the company has "worked for 12 years ... to win the trust of our 70 million BlackBerry subscribers, and we're going to fully commit to winning that trust back, 100 percent."
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 yesterday. On Tuesday night, RIM said the ongoing problems were caused by a core switch failure inside its network. During a Wednesday conference call, the company said the problems were not related to a hack.
RIM's chief information officer, Robin Bienfait, posted a region-specific update on RIM.com last night. In Europe, the Middle East, India, and Africa, email systems are working and RIM continues to clear message backlogs, BBM traffic is online, but browsing is temporarily unavailable. In Canada and Latin America, email is operational, as is BBM and browsing, except for three carriers in Latin America, which do not have browsing access. In the U.S., meanwhile, email, BBM, and browsing should be working, but support teams are investigating reports of BBM delays.
The main problem, RIM said yesterday, is message backlogs. The company's systems are operational, but the downtime produced a huge queue of undelivered messages, which caused traffic jams and delays around the world.
To keep tabs on when your BlackBerry might be working again, RIM has been posting updates on its Web site, as well as on Twitter.
Editor's Note: This story was updated at 11:15am Eastern with comments from this morning's call.