After 4 days, RIM’s BlackBerry service has been completely restored to normal activity levels after round the clock work done to recover the service and the backlog of messages as a result of the failure of a major service node based in Britain as well as the unexpected failure of its emergency backup on Monday. The failure caused further service interruptions in Africa, India and the Middle East before spreading to North and South America yesterday.
As a result of the downtime, RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis took to YouTube to express regret over the situation late last night and initially refused to give a timetable on when service would be restored, until an early morning teleconference held today confirmed that service would return back to normal within the next few hours, though US services have yet to be completely restored. RIM also declined to comment on whether or not it would work with its carrier partners to offer compensation for the nearly week-long outage.
The outage came at the worst possible time for the embattled and beleaguered company as it prepares for its annual DevCon conference next week in San Francisco, where RIM is expected to debut the first devices based on its new QNX-based operating system as well as the long-delayed PlayBook 2.0 update, which RIM expects to revitalize its floundering tablet.
