Blackberry Service Now Fully Restored, With Explanation Of Outages

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A lot of you out there–if the comments sections on the various pieces we did about the RIM network outage–noticed when Blackberry service went down over the last few days. But now, the service has been thoroughly restored, so say the reports from RIM, and we even now know just what happened in the first place to take the network down.

RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis, amid apologies to their customer base, explained just what happened to do so much damage to RIM service. Basically, the whole thing was a substantial hardware failure. A “dual redundant core switch” failed, which caused a large swath of the failures. Backup equipment designed to help alleviate such problems found itself quickly overwhelmed, and what looked like a cascade failure began in earnest, taking out equipment located well away from the problem geographically.

No one’s sure, or at least no one’s saying, as yet just why all these failures occurred in the first place, but the reports all suggest that RIM is currently talking to its various suppliers trying to figure out both what went wrong and how to make sure it doesn’t do so again. Meanwhile, Blackberry users should find their various devices filling up with messages that had been queued up and are now going through servers.

This outage, of course, came at a terrible time for RIM, who is facing essentially the fight of its life as Android-based competitors get steadily more numerous and Apple cements its position as current top dog with the release of the iPhone 4S. Outages generally have the effect of reducing perceived reliability, and for a company that’s primarily geared toward business users, a lack of reliability is a blow that’s hard to get past.

So what about you guys out there? All you Blackberry device users get your service back yet? Thinking about throwing Blackberry over for another service? Or have you accepted that occasional outages are part of life for most any network? Either way, we want to hear from you, so head on down to the comments section below and fill us in!