Research In Motion is making internal changes to ensure that a massive outage of its BlackBerry e-mail service like the one that hit thousands of North American users this week doesn't happen again, its co-chief executive said on Friday.
"It's very rare that we have these events," Jim Balsillie told Reuters in an interview.
"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," he said.
The outage, which hit Tuesday night and lasted well into Wednesday for some, left business executives, lawyers, politicians and others addicted to the "CrackBerry" without uninterrupted on-the-go e-mail 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 on Wednesday morning. Balsillie said that the top priority was restoring service.
"It wasn't a capacity issue, it wasn't a security issue. It was an outage overnight when there was an upgrade," he said.
Still, capacity was a concern raised by at least one analyst, who questioned whether Waterloo, Ontario-based RIM has enough infrastructure to handle the torrid pace of its growth.
The company has about 8 million subscribers for various models of its BlackBerry device. It added more than 1 million in the last quarter alone and plans to add more than that in the three months ending June 2.
RIM said in an e-mailed statement late Thursday night 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.
"I think what this says is this is something we accidentally caused to ourselves," Balsillie said.
As well, RIM's process to reroute traffic to a backup system did not perform as expected.
"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," Balsillie said. "Of course you take action to ensure it doesn't happen again."
He added the company is communicating "very actively" with customers about the outage, but wouldn't comment beyond that.
"Do people like this happened? No. But we're taking it very very seriously and we're supporting our customers," he said.
RIM's shares were up 15 cents at $132.64 on Nasdaq. On the Toronto Stock Exchange, they were down C$1.10 at C$148.75.
($1=$1.12 Canadian)
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