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RIM makes changes in wake of BlackBerry blackout
It won't happen again, says co-chief exec...

By Reuters

Published: Monday 23 April 2007

RIM is making internal changes to ensure that a massive outage of its BlackBerry email service, like the one that hit thousands of North American users last week, doesn't happen again, its co-chief executive said.

Jim Balsillie said in an interview: "It's very rare that we have these events.

"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."

The outage left business executives, lawyers, politicians and others addicted to the 'CrackBerry' without uninterrupted on-the-go email access, which has been the BlackBerry's main draw.

Some fumed, accusing the company of being less than forthcoming about the cause of the outage and what it was doing to address it while it was still ongoing. Balsillie said the top priority had been restoring service.

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

Still, capacity was a concern raised by at least one analyst, who questioned whether RIM has enough infrastructure to handle the torrid pace of its growth.

The company has about eight million subscribers for various models of its BlackBerry device. It added more than one million in the last quarter alone and plans to add more than that in the three months ending 2 June.

RIM said in an emailed statement at the end of last week that the cause of the outage was a new storage feature that had not been properly tested. It "triggered a compounding series of interaction errors" in RIM's operations.

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

In addition, RIM's process to reroute traffic to a back-up system did not perform as expected.

Balsillie added: "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. Of course you take action to ensure it doesn't happen again."

He said the company is communicating "very actively" with customers about the outage but wouldn't comment beyond that.

Balsillie added: "Do people like this happened? No. But we're taking it very very seriously, and we're supporting our customers."

RIM's shares were up 15 cents at $132.64 on Nasdaq. On the Toronto Stock Exchange, they were down C$1.10 (£0.49) at C$148.75 (£66.26).