RIM investigates BlackBerry outage

Research In Motion Limited, trying to rebuild client faith in its BlackBerry smartphone network after a three-day outage last month, has formed a SWAT team to find the cause of the failure across five continents.Bloombergreported that the group, under the Chief Technology Officer, Mr. David Yach, would go as far as considering whether the server network should be redesigned, the Head of Regional Sales and Marketing, Mr. Patrick Spence, said in an interview in London.Do we need to make any changes to either distribute traffic differently or look at how we do this completely differently' Spence said. This will certainly give us pause to figure if theres something else we need to be doing and so we are looking at what is the longer-term impact. Theres nothing thats not on the table.The network failure began in Europe and the Middle East and spread to North and South America. Co-CEOs Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie came under fire for not addressing the failure publicly until the third day, when Lazaridis issued a video apology. Even before the outage, RIM was fending off investor demands for fresh management and trying to stem market-share losses to competitors including Apple Incorporated.RIM said the delays were caused by a core switch failure within its infrastructure. While the system is designed to transfer to a backup switch, that did not happen, resulting in a large backlog of data that spread across the network.RIM routes its traffic through two main centres, in Waterloo for North America and in Slough, southern England, for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, said Nick Dillon, an analyst at research firm Ovum in London.The company would consider sending more traffic through network operators, Spence said today.Carriers including Vodafone Group Plc, the worlds largest network operator, have offered refunds to some BlackBerry users in territories including South Africa and Egypt.
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