RIM Founder Apologizes for BlackBerry Outage as Services Come Back to Life

Posted 10/13/2011 at 7:36am | by Paul Lilly

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Following a three-day outage that disrupted the flow of data and services for millions of BlackBerry customers around the world, services are finally starting to come back online. Research In Motion posted an update on its website announcing that "BlackBerry services are operating well globally," though it's still not clear when RIM's backend infrastructure will be firing on all cylinders.

"BlackBerry Support teams continue to monitor the situation around the clock to ensure ongoing service stability," RIM said in a statement. "Some customers in Canada and Latin America who are sending messages to other regions may see intermittent message delays. Support teams are actively addressing this."

Also on RIM's website is an embedded YouTube video with what appears to be a heartfelt (albeit scripted) apology from RIM founder Mike Lazaridis.

"Since launching BlackBerry in 1999, it's been my goal to provide reliable, real-time communications around the world. We did not deliver on that goal this week. Not even close. I apologize for the service outages this week. We've let many of you down," Lazaridis lamented.

During a subsequent press conference this morning, RIM acknowledged that this was the largest outage the company has ever experienced, but didn't address exactly how customers were affected.