If you own a BlackBerry, you’ll probably never forget this past week’s outage in North America, which left “CrackBerry” addicts confused, scared and email-less. Up until Friday afternoon, RIM had offered no official explanation, at which point the Canadian vendor released a statement blaming “the introduction of a new, non-critical system routine” at its Canadian network operations center. As some BlackBerry fans will know, all email received on BlackBerrys in North America passes through this center and unfortunately for the company, “the pretesting of the [new] system routine proved inadequate” on this particular occasion. Whoops. This, of course, “triggered a compounding series of interaction errors” and upon realizing this, RIM attempted to switch to a backup system which, by some stroke of luck, was also screwy and only caused further delays for BlackBerry users. Double Whoops. The company is currently “improving its testing, monitoring and recovery processes” in order to keep this sort of fiasco from happening again in the future.

For more on the outage:
– see this article in The New York Times
– or this AP article