Today at 10AM EST, RIM’s Co-CEOs, Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, as well as David Yach, the CTO of RIM, were on a call to talk about the recent BlackBerry outage and what happened. It’s important to note that RIM has had great track record with uptime and while this particular outage has been much more serious than any other we can remember, the real problem was the timing. After all the punishment RIM has taken in the media, this outage couldn’t have come at a worse time. More about the conference call after the jump.
Mike Lazaridis started off with an apology and said they’ll be sorting out the issues soon and begin on restoring confidence with customers. You can watch the above video of Mike Lazaridis giving an apology and talking about the issue. Mike also took the time to explain what caused the outage and it was described as follows:
On Monday, a dual-redundant, high capacity core switch failed. This caused failures in the EMEA. This EMEA failure caused a cascade-failure in the system and a backup switch didn’t work. This meant that there was an incredible amount of data and RIM has been working to “drain the pool of data” so to speak. The reason for the spread to Latin America is that much of the infrastructure there is serviced by EMEA infrastructure.
Now, the focus is:
1. Working with vendors to prevent future failures.
2. Auditing the infrastructure to better understand why it took so long to bring the network back online.
3. Working to restore trust.
The question and answer session talked about reparations but it’s a little too early to talk about that. There’s also software license agreements with BES users and RIM will be dealing with those customers moving forward.
