RIM Explains Monday's BlackBerry Outage

RIM just sent us this update on why its BlackBerry service went dark for users on Monday. According to RIM's preliminary investigation, the service outage was due to "an internal data routing system within the BlackBerry service infrastructure that had been recently upgraded.

The upgrade was part of RIM?s routine and ongoing efforts to increase overall capacity for longer term growth. RIM continuously increases the capacity of its infrastructure in advance of longer term demand. Similar upgrades have been successfully implemented in the past, but there appears to have been a problem with this specific upgrade that caused the intermittent service delays."

The company is quick to point out that no messages were lost in the outage, and that the system continues to operate normally today. A full analysis of the problem that caused the outage is ongoing.

While some observers are slamming RIM for its second nationwide service outage in the last year, I think it's important to note that service blips are an unfortunate by-product in this service-oriented digital age. Google Calendar has been victim; so too have countless ISPs (fess 'up--when did your cable or DSL last hiccup on you, be it for 20 minutes or 20 hours?). This is not to excuse RIM's issues: The fact that the company notes it was performing the initial upgrade to help increase overall capacity for the long-term is notable simply because it acknowledges that capacity is a concern. Of equal concern to BlackBerry users, though, is how RIM addresses such issues, how the company recovers from them, and what safeguards it puts in place to prevent them from happening again. I, for one, will be watching closely.

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