RIM Claims Fix for Global BlackBerry Outage

RIM just released a statement in which it claims to fix the service issue plaguing its BlackBerry users this week. The issue caused three days of outages of BBM messaging and email services. 

Yesterday, the company apologized for the major inconvenience this outage has caused users and promised it was working on a solution. Later in the day RIM claimed that service levels were increasing and announced that email systems in the U.S., Europe, Middle East, India, Africa, Canada and Latin America were operating, while the company continued to clear backlogged messages. RIM also stated that BBM traffic was restored and passing successfully everywhere, except for three carrier networks in Latin America that are serviced by the EMEA infrastructure. 

Today, RIM confirmed that BlackBerry services are operating well globally and support teams continue to monitor the situation to ensure ongoing service stability. The outage, caused by a failure of a crucial link in RIM’s infrastructure, began hitting BlackBerry customers on Monday, starting in Europe and spreading to the U.S. 

The company has released a video apology from Mike Lazaridis, RIM co-CEO:

 This outage is a result of the way the BlackBerry service works. All messages and emails are routed through servers run by RIM. This allows the company to makes these more secure. However, it also opens the system up to very wide-spread outages, if a problem developers at one of more of RIM's servers.

This is not the first time the BlackBerry service has been down, but it comes at a bad time for the company. Its marketshare is slipping as it faces tough competition from smartphones running Google's Android OS, as well as the iPhone.