BlackBerry is sorry. Very, very sorry. But amid slippingmarket share and an uncertain future, saying "sorry" may not beenough to win over disgruntled customers after this week's worldwide serviceinterruptions.
On a conference call this morning, the company said allservices are "back up globally." It said there is still a backlog ofwireless emails that may delay some messages. It could not say how quickly itwould be over.
Mike Lazaridis, founder of BlackBerry's Canadian parentcompany, Research In Motion, appeared this morning in a YouTube video to say,"Since launching BlackBerry in 1999, it's been my goal to providereliable, real-time communications around the world. We did not deliver on thatgoal this week. Not even close.
"I apologize for the service outages this week,"he said. "We've let many of you down."
Looking tired and stressed in a black shirt with aBlackBerry logo, Lazaridis said service was approaching normal levels inEurope, the Middle East, India and Africa. He promised that the company wouldwork around the clock to get the problems solved.
But those service problem surfaced on Monday, and Lazaridisdid not appear until Thursday. Public relations executives who specialize inwhat is known as crisis management say the slow public response was almost asdisastrous for RIM as the technical breakdowns in BlackBerry service.
Ronn Torossian, the CEO of 5W Public Relations, said RIM hadfailed to show a human face in the early days of the problem. Instead, itresponded slowly -- with gibberish.
"Blackberry spokespersons are communicating withmessages like 'Message delays were caused by a core switch failure in RIM'sinfrastructure,'" Torossian said in an email. "That's notconsumer-friendly English which resonates with people, and few of us know (orcare) what a 'core switch' is. We just want our damn blackberries towork."
Lazaridis told reporters RIM has had a reliability recordthis year -- at least until this week -- of 99.97 percent. But Monday's outage,which happened without warning, was the largest the company had everexperienced, he said.
Jim Balsillie, his co-CEO, chimed in: "Nobody here hasgone home since Monday."
Asked by ABC News if RIM planned anything to compensateangry customers, Lazaridis said, "That's something we plan to address verysoon. And that is a priority."
Even though service appeared to be improving today, RIM'spublic image apparently wasn't helped by Lazaridis' appearance. Users onlinewere merciless.
"Its great that you apologized for the outage but whatelse did you tell us?" wrote one person on YouTube after the video wasposted. "Step down and let someone else fix this."
Another wrote, "The best way to apologize, give allblackberry services and applications FREE."
Wall Street seemed to agree. RIM stock opened down 3 percentthis morning.