RIM’s black-out finally comes to an end after four days of horror experiences

The horror finally ended for Research In Motion (RIM), as co-CEO Mike Lazaridis confirmed that the outages within BlackBerry’s network are over. The service outage held a duration of four days and shocked many of BlackBerry’s users world-wide. Research In Motion co-CEO Mike Lazaridis later apologized on a video for his customers and hopes no such thing takes place again.

Lazaridis, in his video apology, stated: “We’ve let many of you down…You expect better from us. And I expect better from us.”

The service issue was initially “resolved” on Monday evening, however RIM later realized that the issues kept going in the Easter hemisphere; the Middle East, Africa, and Europe. RIM notified its users that the outage was because of a “core switch failure”. On Wednesday, RIM added that the massive backlog dealing with e-mails was the cause to the stress on its systems; this massive backlog was primarily the cause of the service outage. India and the Americas subsequently suffered the outage as well. In response, Lazaridis responded another time: “We are working around the clock to fix this… He later added that BlackBerry was heading back on track.”

As a result, BlackBerry users were still discouraged by the fact that their services were put on hold and weren’t resolved. That was when Lazaridis submitted his video of apologies to his consumers. At 10:00 a.m. ET yesterday, Lazaridis announced that all BlackBerry services were up and running.

A few hours later, the people at BGR got a hold of RIM and received additional news on the topic. The issue, in detail, was due to a “switch failure” causing the massive amounts of backlogged e-mails mentioned before. This was in fact the root cause of the long service outage which caused millions of BlackBerry users to suffer a service loss. At the moment, RIM is searching to find a few methods to prevent another catastrophic event from happening again. They are placing fixes to the system to ensure stability.

Because of the large issue at hand, RIM is now also looking into a way to reimburse their consumers, including their carriers for their losses. A reimbursement of this kind may require a large share of expenses on RIM’s behalf, but that is how business works. If the client cannot be satisfied with their product, the seller or provider must be held liable for adjustments.

Many technology sources on the web believed that RIM was headed for the wrong direction and was close to failure. Some argued that this was just a minor setback on RIM’s behalf and that RIM would recover as always. Did this outage truly affect RIM’s reputation as a notable company? In the past, RIM was known as a businesses’ approach to technology. But if businesses lost reception with their BlackBerry’s for 4 consecutive days, could that affected their partnership with RIM? All of those questions heavily depend on RIM’s approach to reimbursement. What will be the payout to their faithful customers and business partners?