BlackBerry service back online globally after worst outage in RIM’s history

BlackBerry users can breathe a sigh of relief. Research in Motion announced today that global BlackBerry services are “operating well” following a massive outage that began Monday and disrupted web, email, and messaging capabilities for tens of millions of customers.

The BlackBerry outage — which was the worst in the company’s history — initially started in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa but spread yesterday to North America. With Apple’s iPhone 4S hitting shelves on Friday, this was certainly the worst possible week for RIM’s services to fall apart.

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RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis issued a video apology for the service disruption (above) and joined co-CEO Jim Balsillie on a conference call this morning to discuss the situation.

“I want to personally apologize to all of the BlackBerry customers we have let down,” Lazaridis said. “You expect better of us. I expect better of us,” he added.

RIM yesterday pointed to a “core switch failure” within its infrastructure as a cause for the failure. On the call, RIM said that it’s working with vendors to prevent any future failures like this, and it’s conducting an analysis of what took its system so long to restart. At this point, it’s not clear which vendors within RIM’s infrastructure failed.

As for what took so long for an apology, Lazaridis said he was busy leading the team to restore the BlackBerry services. The company hasn’t yet decided on how it will make reparations to customers, but that will be a focus now that the services are back up.

When asked if the company is concerned about alienating customers so close to the new iPhone’s launch, one of the executives said, ” We’ve worked 12 years since the launch of the BlackBerry … We’re going to fully commit to win that trust back.”

Via AllThingsD