Blackberry services are still crumbling

STUMBLING COMMUNICATIONS FIRM Research in Motion (RIM) has gone into apology overdrive as it continues to sort out its apparently fragile proprietary network.

Earlier this week the company suffered a core switch failure at a data centre in Slough, UK. This was fixed, but failed again, and then started a domino effect of problems that spread from the UK, through Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and finally to North America and Canada.

RIM has apologised often for the problems, about as often as it has said it is fixing them, and last night it apologised again.

"I want to first apologize for the service interruptions and delays many of you have been experiencing this week. I also wanted to connect with you directly, give you an update on the service issues we are trying to solve, and answer some of the questions and concerns you've expressed, said RIM CIO Robin Bienfait in a letter released last night.

"You've depended on us for reliable, real-time communications, and right now we're letting you down. We are taking this very seriously and have people around the world working around the clock to address this situation. We believe we understand why this happened and we are working to restore normal service levels in all markets as quickly as we can."

The Canadian firm accompanied this with up to the date information on which regions are affected by outages, but soon released another, and then another, that explained that services might have been improving for some users.

The latest information, released at 6am this morning. advises us that services, in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, at least, are operating with "significant improvement". µ