RIM held a quick press conference call today to address the ongoing outages which started in Europe but have spread to the rest of the world, including the US. The message was straightforward: a “core switch failure” in their European unit (though they did not give the exact location) that failed to turn over to one of the backup systems. The total failure resulted in a backlog of messages that they are chewing through at this moment.
The problems here in the US are a direct result of that backup, and messages to certain European subscribers or that must pass through Europe are being delayed. RIM’s David Yach assured us that no messages or emails were being dropped, only delayed, and traffic was not being throttled.
Lastly, they wanted to make clear that this was strictly a technical problem and not the result of a hack or breach. And naturally, their top priority is the reestablishment of service, though they did not give any kind of time estimate or guarantee regarding that.