RIM’s BlackBerry services are back up and running, following a service outage that, at its peak, even hit the firm’s lucrative US customers.
Co-founder Mike Lazaridis announced the reboot late yesterday, stating the firm is getting back to normal service levels in Europe, Africa, India and the Middle East. However he cautioned there may still be some instability as the firm’s servers get back up to speed.
The re-start ends a three day outage caused when a core switch in a UK data center failed. Subscribers in Europe and the Middle East & Africa were initially affected, but the problem quickly spread to parts of Asia Pacific and North America.
While Lazaridis admitted the firm has let its customers down, there was no word on whether compensation will be paid to subscribers.
But the UAE's Etisalat and Du were yesterday reported to be negotiating with RIM over compensation for the operators' respective BlackBerry subscribers.
Despite reports of anger among RIM’s faithful, Malik Saadi, a principal analyst with Informa Telecoms & Media, believes most customers will stand by the firm. “It will take more than just a couple of collapses to persuade loyal consumers of BlackBerry services to look for alternatives.”
His view is backed up by comments on CrackBerry.com, with most users accepting that outages can happen, and some even reporting workarounds using the firm’s PlayBook tablet.