Filed by KOSU News in Business.
October 13, 2011

As BlackBerrys start to work right again in some parts of the world after three days of outages, the founder of the company that makes the devices is apologizing to users this morning — and conceding that he can’t yet say when things will be completely back to normal.

“I apologize,” Research in Motion founder Mike Lazaridis says in a video the company put online today. “We’ve let many of you down. … You expect better from us 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 didn’t mention North America, where outages were reported yesterday.

“We’re doing everything in our power to restore regular service levels,” he added.

Lazaridis said he would like to be able to forecast when everything will be fixed, but said “I cannot do so with certainty at this time.”

As The Associated Press writes:

“A crucial link in BlackBerry’s European network failed Monday, and a backup also failed. Although the underlying issues were quickly repaired, the system had built up a backlog of emails and messages that needed to be wound down. Meanwhile, messages destined for Europe were piling up at BlackBerry data centers in the rest of world. By Wednesday, the outage had spread to the U.S. and Canada, slowing service to a crawl there.”

[Copyright 2011 National Public Radio]