BlackBerry maker says software caused blackout
After two days of frustrating silence about a lengthy outage in its BlackBerry e-mail service, the company that makes the addictive mobile communication device issued a jargon-laden update indicating a minor software upgrade had crashed the system.
The statement late Thursday night by Research in Motion Ltd. said the outage from Tuesday evening into Wednesday morning was triggered by “the introduction of a new, noncritical system routine” designed to optimize the cache, or temporary memory, on the computer servers that run the BlackBerry network.
“The pretesting of the system routine proved to be insufficient,” the company said.
The failed upgrade apparently set off a domino effect of glitches, which the company referred to as “a compounding series of interaction errors between the system’s operational database and cache.”
The Canadian company said a “failover process” to switch to a backup system “did not fully perform to [Research in Motion’s] expectations.”
That led to a delay in restoring service and “processing the resulting message queue,” a reference to the backlog of undelivered e-mail that accumulated during the outage.
The outage and the company’s delayed, tight-lipped response to the situation angered some customers. It is an approach the company has taken with past service outages, which have been rare.
Yet with the rapid expansion beyond its longtime focus on business users -- the new BlackBerry Pearl has been a smash hit with consumers since its launch last summer -- some experts say the company needs to get more savvy in dealing with problems.
“So far, all we have gotten from [Research in Motion] are explanations fit for engineers, not customers,” said Richard S. Levick, whose firm, Levick Strategic Communications, specializes in crisis communications.
Although most of the latest outage happened outside “work” hours, the always-connected mentality fueled by BlackBerry’s success left many users feeling disjointed and aggravated when their devices stopped buzzing. Grumbles were heard at the highest levels of business and government, including the White House and the Canadian Parliament.
It took the company more than 12 hours to issue a vague three-sentence statement acknowledging the disruption. No further updates were provided until late Thursday’s statement.
Research in Motion said it had ruled out security and capacity issues, along with hardware failure or core software problems, as the cause of the disruption. The company said it was improving its testing, monitoring and recovery processes to prevent such an outage from happening again.
