Blackberry service 'is improving'

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13 October 2011 Last updated at 11:39 GMT RIM founder Mike Lazaridis: "We expect continued progress but a bit of instability along the way"

Blackberry's founder Mike Lazaridis has said services "are returning to normal", following a three-day global blackout.

Millions of customers worldwide had their messaging and email service disrupted with many turning to Twitter to express their anger.

In a video message on the company website Mr Lazaridis gave no date for when a full service would be restored.

He also warned that there could be more instabilities to come.

"We are now approaching normal levels in Europe, the Middle East, India and Africa," he said, although there could be possible "instabilities" as the firm continued to clear the backlog of messages and emails.

"I'd like to give an estimated time for full recovery round the world but I cannot do this at this time," he added.

RIM has been responding more quickly to customers in the last 24 hours, following criticism that it was not communicating well when the problems began.

"We know we've let many of you down. You expect more from us. I expect more from us," he said.

Users began to report loss of services mid-morning on 10 October and the problems spread around the world.

The firm is keen to be seen as sorting the problems swiftly, following confusion earlier in the week when it said services were back to normal, only to be contradicted by frustrated customers.

Robin Bienfait, chief information officer of RIM, the Canada-based owner of Blackberry, issued an apology for the ongoing issues.

"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," he said.

"We believe we understand why this happened and we are working to restore normal service levels in all markets as quickly as we can."

It blamed the ongoing issues on a backlog of emails to Europe from Asia and the Americas, following a "core switch failure" in its infrastructure.

"Clearly we have a backlog in Europe... as you can imagine, with the global reach of Blackberry and people using it to contact others around the world, there's a lot of messages to Europe from Asia and the Americas," RIM software vice president David Yach told a press conference in Ottawa, Canada.

"Over time that backlog has built up and affected our other systems."

'Data backlog'

Many tweeters called on the phone firm to "sort out" the problems and get the network running again.

RIM eventually explained what had caused the problems in the first place.

"The messaging and browsing delays... in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, India, Brazil, Chile and Argentina were caused by a core switch failure within RIM's infrastructure," a company statement said.

"Although the system is designed to failover to a back-up switch, the failover did not function as previously tested.

"As a result, a large backlog of data was generated and we are now working to clear that backlog and restore normal service as quickly as possible."

The server problems are believed to have originated at RIM's UK data centre in Slough.

The "issues" left many Blackberry owners only able to text and make calls.

BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones: "Blackberry has so many high profile users who are complaining about the crash"

Such a major failure will come as unwelcome news to RIM, which has been losing market share to smartphone rivals - in particular Apple's iPhone.

Many corporate clients have switched to the device after Apple made a concerted effort to improve its support for secure business email systems.

Malik Saadi, principal analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media, said the timing of the outages was bad for RIM.

"The current situation with the Blackberry outages couldn't come at a worse time for RIM, following some harsh criticism in recent months," he said.

Such crashes may lead RIM and others to "re-evaluate their reliance on centralised servers and instead look to investing in more corporately controlled servers", he added.

But he thinks customers will stick with the firm despite current frustrations.

"It will take more than just a couple of collapses to persuade loyal consumers of Blackberry services to look for alternatives," he said.

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"BlackBerry: ' we have many of you let;" Still working, the service to restore

Enlarge Damien Meyer / AFP/Getty Images Damien Meyer/AFP/Getty Images

As BlackBerrys are beginning to work properly again in some parts of the world after three days of failure, the founder of the company, which is the power of the devices today for user morning - and apologize conceding, that he still didn't say if things entirely back will be normal.

"I apologize," research in motion says founder of Mike Lazaridis in a video, the company today provided online. "We have disappoint many of you." ... "You expect from us better and I expect better from us."

According to Lazaridis, BlackBerry text services are back to "normal levels in Europe, the Middle East, India and Africa." He mentioned not North America, where failures were reported yesterday.

"We do everything in our power to restore regular service level," he added.

Lazaridis said he would like to able to predict when everything will be resolved, but said, "I this with certainty at this point not."

The associated press writes:

"An important link in the BlackBerry European network not Monday, and also from a backup." Even though the underlying problems were quickly repaired, had built a backlog of emails and messages that you had to be wound up the system. In the meantime been news for Europe data centers in the rest of the world are piling up in BlackBerry. "By Wednesday it had slowed the failure in the United States and Canada, to a crawl."

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TECHNOLOGY, Spotify Music Service Opens to All; Gains Facebook Streaming

Online music sharing service Spotify dropped its invite-only status in the United States, opening the doors of the service to everyone.
Music listeners who sign up for the service will receive unlimited access to its library of more than 15 million tunes for six months. After that, the standard limits on a free subscription will kick in: 10 hours of listening per month, and during that period no one song can be listened to more than five times.
Spotify music serviceThe service also has two paid plans. For $4.99, it has no time limits and no advertising. For $9.99, you have the added benefit of being able to download the songs in your online playlists to a mobile device and play them offline.
The free part of the service is by far the most popular. In Europe, for example, where Spotify has some 50 million subscribers, only 1 million subscribe to one of the paid plans.
Spotify's CEO Daniel Ek leaked the news of the move to TechCrunch writer Alexia Tsotsis at the Facebook F8 developer's conference.
Dismantling of the invite-only system will take some time, Ek told Tsotsis, but people can obtain immediate access to the offer by registering for Spotify through Facebook.
Spotify's partnership with Facebook was announced yesterday at F8. Ek, writing in a company blog, explained why Facebook integration was a natural for the service. "We knew that the service had to be free to draw people away from piracy," he wrote. "To do that, we also knew that the service would have to be inherently social. There couldn’t be a better place to do this than Facebook."
What Facebook users will start seeing in their news feeds are Spotify music posts from their friends. Click on the post, and a song will play. Other Spotify Facebook features include a music dashboard and a real-time ticker to see the trending music tastes of your Facebook buddies.
There are some questions, though, about just how integrated Spotify is with Facebook. PCWorld's Mark Sullivan made this observation after viewing a one-on-one demo of Spotify working within Facebook: "When the Facebook guy giving the demo clicked on a song that one of his friends was listening to on Spotify ... the desktop Spotify app popped up to play the music."
"He told me," Sullivan continued, "that there is no 'canvas app' for Spotify, which, he explained, means that there’s no Spotify app that runs entirely inside Facebook, as Farmville [does]. That means you have to have both the Spotify desktop app and Facebook running to achieve the cool music sharing/syncing tricks shown at F8 today."
In his blog post, Ek suggested that bringing Spotify to Facebook could revive the music industry. "Social discovery on Facebook means that we’re bringing people back to paying for music again," he wrote. "And that's how the brilliant artists who create this music can continue creating it for us to enjoy."
We wonder if Ek is aware of the irony in that statement. One of Facebook's founders is Sean Parker, who, with the release of Napster, started the precipitous spiral the music industry is in now. How ironic it would be if a company connected to Parker could be a savior of the industry he helped destabilize.

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