RIM’s Lazaridis Claims BlackBerry Service Restored

Executives at Research In Motion claim that BlackBerry services are fully restored after a global outage.

RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis told media and analysts during an 13 October 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.

Service Failure

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 12 October. “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.”

Transition Period

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 US 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 15 September earnings call, RIM reported revenue of $4.2 billion (£2.7bn) for the second quarter of fiscal 2012, a 15 percent decline from the $4.9 billion (£3.1bn) 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.