Research In Motion acknowledged an outage left users in the Americas without access to their BlackBerry e-mail service on Monday, but said no messages were lost during the incident.
The outage started at around 3:30 p.m. Eastern time and lasted for about three hours, causing “intermittent delays” for data services, RIM said in an e-mail statement released hours after normal BlackBerry service had been restored.
“No messages were lost and message queues began to be cleared after normal service levels were restored,” RIM said, adding that voice and SMS services operated normally during the outage.
RIM offered an apology to users affected by the outage, but did not offer an explanation of what happened. The company only said it “continues to focus on providing industry-leading reliability in its products and services.”
Monday’s outage echoed a similar disruption that took place on April 17-18, 2007. RIM blamed the earlier service disruption on the introduction of a new software routine meant to optimize system cache memory. The problems caused by the introduction of the new routine were exacerbated by the poor performance of back-up systems, RIM said at the time.
After the April 2007 outage, RIM promised that aspects of its testing, monitoring and recovery systems would be enhanced to prevent a recurrence of the incident.