Monday, 23 April 2007

RIM Chief: Repeat BlackBerry Outage 'Unlikely'

Research In Motion (RIM) has started taking all the necessary precautions to ensure that a massive outage of its BlackBerry e-mail service, similar to the one that happened a week back does not happen again.

"It's very rare that we have these events," RIM co-chief Jim Balsillie said.

"I think it's pretty likely that the systems are in place that this kind of thing, as incredibly unlikely as it is to happen, is all the more unlikely to happen again," he said.

The outage lasted 24 hours for some leaving them without uninterrupted on-the-go e-mail access.

"It wasn't a capacity issue, it wasn't a security issue. It was an outage overnight when there was an upgrade," he said.

A week earlier, the company had said that the reason for the outage was that a new storage feature had not been properly tested. It "triggered a compounding series of interaction errors" in the company’s facilities.

"I think what this says is this is something we accidentally caused to ourselves," Balsillie said.

"There are times when a mistake can happen and you think your processes are designed to handle every eventuality, and every now and then, one doesn't," Balsillie said. "Of course you take action to ensure it doesn't happen again."