The BlackBerry outage that started on Monday and, at one point, spanned five continents is officially over. So said RIM's (NASDAQ: RIMM) co-CEOs at a status update on Thursday. During a conference call, the executives apologized and promised that the company "...will take every action feasible, to minimize the risk of this happening again." 

In what they acknowledged as the worst outage in the company's history, problems first cropped up in Europe, Asia and the Middle East at the beginning of the week. This later spread to countries such as Africa, India, Brazil, Chile and Argentina and eventually surfaced in the United States on Wednesday. BlackBerry users from affected regions complained of delayed messages, an inability to send and receive emails, BlackBerry Messenger chats, or surf the net. Some users were spared, as the outages were sporadic.

RIM has attributed the service outage to the failure of a core network switch, exacerbated by unexpected problems when switching to a backup.  A "cascade failure" resulted, which started overloading systems elsewhere. When quizzed, the company declined to name the vendor of the switch and cited a multi-vendor infrastructure. RIM is continuing analysis of the root cause.

Unlike competing push email architecture like Microsoft's Exchange Server, RIM's system makes use of a centralized model which uses its proprietary Network Operating Center (NOC) to route data. I have some thoughts on that, which you can read in my commentary today.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at InformationWeek
- check out this article at Network World

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