The maker of the Blackberry wireless e-mail device says an
insufficiently tested software upgrade was the cause of this week's
network failure.
Blackberry's US and North American users lost their service on
Tuesday and Wednesday as a result of the problem.
Research In Motion (RIM) said it was now looking to improve its
testing and recovery processes to prevent such an outage happening
again.
There are about eight million Blackberry users around the
world.
'Below expectations'
Blackberry said in a statement that the failure was trigged by "the
introduction of a new, non-critical system routine" designed to
increase the system's e-mail holding space.
It admitted that "the pre-testing of the system routine proved to
be insufficient".
RIM added that the process designed to maintain the service in the
event of a failure "did not fully perform to its expectations",
causing a longer delay before the system was restored.
Analysts said they did not expect the outage to affect the
Blackberry's popularity.
"So long as RIM solves whatever went wrong and communicates it well
enough to customers, we foresee no lasting impact," said D Newcrest
analyst Chris Umiastowski.
It is estimated that RIM has around 45% of the market for smart
phones.
Preliminary figures recently showed that the firm's profits jumped
tenfold to $187m (£94m) in the three months to 3 March.
The network disruption comes as RIM faces a formal probe by the US
financial watchdog, the Securities and Exchange Commission, over
its stock options.
From BBC news 