software News

Messages safe in BlackBerry outage, RIM says
An apology but no explanation for three-hour service failure
February 12, 2008 (IDG News Service) Research In Motion Ltd. acknowledged that an outage left users in North America without access to their BlackBerry e-mail service on Monday, but it said no messages were lost during the incident.
The outage started around 3:30 p.m. Eastern time and lasted for about three hours, causing "intermittent delays" for data services, RIM said in an e-mail statement released hours after normal BlackBerry service had been restored.
"No messages were lost, and message queues began to be cleared after normal service levels were restored," RIM said, adding that voice and Short Messaging Service services operated normally during the outage.
Waterloo, Ontario-based RIM apologized to users affected by the outage, but it did not offer an explanation of what happened. The company only said it "continues to focus on providing industry-leading reliability in its products and services."
Monday's outage echoed a similar disruption that took place on April 17 and 18. RIM blamed the earlier service disruption on the introduction of a new software routine meant to optimize system cache memory. The problems caused by the introduction of the new routine were exacerbated by the poor performance of backup systems, RIM said at the time.
After the April outage, RIM promised that aspects of its testing, monitoring and recovery systems would be enhanced to prevent a recurrence of the incident.