After three days of service outages, Research in Motion announced that BlackBerry’s service has now improved.  According to RIM, the outage problem was from a system failure followed by “backlog issues.”

RIM reported that BlackBerry services in Europe, Middle East, Africa and India “have improved significantly,” and they are continuously monitoring the situation to ensure ongoing stability.

RIM’s chief information officer, Robin Bienfait, issued an apology for the ongoing service outage.

“I want to first apologize for the service interruptions and delays many of you have been experiencing this week. I also wanted to connect with you directly, give you an update on the service issues we are trying to solve, and answer some of the questions and concerns you’ve expressed.

You’ve depended on us for reliable, real-time communications, and right now we’re letting you down. We are taking this very seriously and have people around the world working around the clock to address this situation. We believe we understand why this happened and we are working to restore normal service levels in all markets as quickly as we can.”

The apology was followed by the current status of their service in different affected areas.

EMEAI

• Email systems are operating and we are continuing to clear any backlogged messages. Support teams are working to minimize the impact on our customers.
• BBM traffic is online and traffic is passing successfully
• Browsing is temporarily unavailable as the Support teams monitor service stability and continue to assess when this service can be safely brought online
• Support teams have added capacity to help with message delivery between regions and continents

Canada and Latin America

• Email systems are operating and we are continuing to clear any backlogged messages. Support teams are working to minimize the impact on our customers
• BBM and browsing services are online and traffic is passing successfully (except for three carrier networks in Latin America that are serviced by the EMEIA infrastructure – browsing is temporarily unavailable for those three carrier networks)
• Support teams are investigating reports of BBM delays

U.S.

• Email systems are operating and we are continuing to clear any backlogged messages. Support teams are working to minimize the impact on our customers.
• Support teams have added capacity to help with message delivery between regions and continents
• BBM and browsing services are online and traffic is passing successfully
• Support teams are investigating reports of BBM delays

The Explanation

And due to insistent public demand that RIM explains why the problem occurred, the Canada-based company finally obliged,

“The messaging and browsing delays… in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, India, Brazil, Chile and Argentina were caused by a core switch failure within RIM’s infrastructure,” a company statement said. “Although the system is designed to failover to a back-up switch, the failover did not function as previously tested.  As a result, a large backlog of data was generated and we are now working to clear that backlog and restore normal service as quickly as possible.”