business-utilities News
BlackBerry says “yes we’ve incurred failures over outages”
As many people in the UK who own a BlackBerry have witnessed over the past week – there’s been a problem…!
Finally the UK boss of BlackBerry, maker Research in Motion’s (RIM) UK managing director Stephen Bates has admitted that they were too slow to update customers about last week’s outages which occurred across Europe, the Middle East and US.
Mr Bates has now indicated via the BBC website that an enquiry and audit is set to take place of its infrastructure, looking at how and why the company struggled to communicate with its millions of customers after they were unable to send email or browse the web for most of last week.
Mr Bates continued to say “We didn’t spend enough time thinking about the communication, so we’ve since spent more time doing that,” he said. “The communication can always be improved and part of the review we’re doing is about that, so we can be much quicker in future.”
He also indicated that it was too early to tell, if there was any specific individual or individuals who deserved to lose their job(s) over the outage problem which stemmed from the company’s Slough network operating centre. The problem is by far the most severe in Canadian based Research in Motion’s history.
Stephen Bates also went on to say “For us, we designed a very resilient system in our infrastructure that has lots of backups”.
“This problem happened with a system that should have backed up in the normal fashion, but it didn’t. We’ve since tested these systems and they appear to be working fine – our team have done everything they can on how and why the initial problem occurred but it seems to be due to an abnormality. It’s still early days, and we’re still investigating and we’re not going to come to any early conclusions on that point.”
Confirmation was made that Research in Motion’s chief technology officer, David Yach, has launched a “full audit of our full infrastructure”. Bates said: “He’s got the authority to do whatever he needs to do to ensure that resiliency is maintained.”
Research in Motion (RIM) has said that compensation is in the offing for those customers who were affected by the outage by way of the offer of £63 ($100) worth of apps from the BlackBerry App World.
Research in Motion’s co-CEO Mike Lazaridis apologises via YouTube
Research in Motion shares opened up 2%, at $22.80, on the NASDAQ stock exchange on Tuesday, but remained almost 3% down on the height of the outage on the 12th October.