RIM Details BlackBerry Service Failures

Earlier today, we reported that RIM apologized for the BlackBerry service outage experienced by users in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and other parts of the world. And now, although many are still without service, the company has issued a statement with a more detailed response as to what caused the issue.

The service first went down yesterday in the early morning, flooding Twitter and other social networks with plenty of complaints from angry users who could no longer access emails and BlackBerry Messenger on their devices. RIM has been apologetic from the start, but has so far only explained that they're working on the problem.

The new statement from RIM details that the downtime was caused by a core switch failure, which was supposed to failover to a back-up switch. Apparently, neither one worked as previously tested and the outage is now going on two days. The issue caused a backlog of data that RIM is still clearing out and the company has not given a timeline as to when the service will resume.

The statement is included below:

"The messaging and browsing delays being experienced by BlackBerry users in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, India, Brazil, Chile and Argentina were caused by a core switch failure within RIM's infrastructure. Although the system is designed to failover to a back-up switch, the failover did not function as previously tested.

As a result, a large backlog of data was generated and we are now working to clear that backlog and restore normal service as quickly as possible.

We apologize for any inconvenience and we will continue to keep you informed."

[via Pocket-lint]