Blackberry says disruptions are over

Oct 14, 2011, 12:03 GMT

San Francisco - Research in Motion founder Mike Lazaridis apologized Thursday for three days of disruption to the company's BlackBerry service, telling reporters that the outages that hit users in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and the Americas were fixed.

'I want to apologize to all the BlackBerry customers we let down,' Mike Lazaridis, RIM's president and co-chief executive, said in a video posted on the company website.

But in a conference call with reporters Thursday morning, Lazaridis admitted that some users may still experience problems as the company struggled to deal with a huge backlog of data that had clogged up the system.

He said any continuing problems experienced by BlackBerry users were likely caused by the lengthy backlog of messages due to the three-day outage.

Laziridis said the outage was caused by a hardware failure that had a ripple effect through the company's systems. Fixing the malfunction 'took much longer than we had expected,' and RIM is now 'taking immediate and aggressive steps' to prevent such an outage from ever happening again, he said.

The disruptions came at the worst possible time for RIM, which is struggling to fend off mounting competition from Apple's iPhone and smartphones powered by Google's Android operating system. The Canadian company's share price has already dropped some 60 per cent this year, and the fear is that the new disruptions are likely to further alienate customers and investors.

Laziridis acknowledged that the company would have to work hard to win back customers' faith. RIM has 'worked for 12 years ... to win the trust of our 70 million BlackBerry subscribers, and we're going to fully commit to winning that trust back, 100 per cent.'