Research In Motion executives claim that BlackBerry services
are fully restored after a global outage.
RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis told media and analysts during an Oct. 13 conference call that the
services had been restored early this morning, some four days after the first
interruptions hit customers in Europe and various countries around the globe.
He also said that “immediate and aggressive steps” are
being taken “to minimize the risk of this happening again.” Both Lazaridis and
co-CEO Jim Balsillie insisted that RIM would work to regain customers’ trust
following the incident.
Earlier this week, RIM blamed the service outages on a “core
switch failure” within its infrastructure. Reports of service failure spread to
North America, where BlackBerry users in Baltimore, New York City and Ontario
told eWEEK they were experiencing issues with their service.
“BlackBerry subscribers in the Americas may be experiencing
intermittent service delays this morning,” RIM wrote in a short message posted
on its Website
Oct. 12. “We are working to resolve the situation as quickly as possible and we
apologize to our customers for any inconvenience.”
In another posting, the company suggested that the issue had
become “our Number One priority right now and we are working night and day to
restore all BlackBerry services to normal levels.”
RIM is in the midst of what its executives term a
“transition period,” with the company prepping a set of QNX-based “superphones”
it hopes will allow it to reclaim the initiative against aggressive competitors
such as Apple’s iPhone and Google Android. Research firm Nielsen estimated the
company’s share of the U.S. smartphone market at 18 percent through August,
behind both Android (43 percent) and Apple’s iOS (28 percent), but well ahead of
Microsoft (8 percent).
RIM acknowledges that demand has slowed for its older
BlackBerry models. During its Sept. 15 earnings call, RIM reported revenue of
$4.2 billion for the second quarter of fiscal 2012, a 15 percent decline from
the $4.9 billion it earned during the previous quarter. The company shipped
some 10.6 million BlackBerry smartphones and around 200,000 BlackBerry-branded
PlayBook tablets during that period. In a bid to maintain its market share
until the QNX devices arrive on the market, the company recently launched a new
line of BlackBerry smartphones running BlackBerry 7 OS.
Follow
Nicholas Kolakowski on Twitter
Enterprise Mobility News & Reviews 
