RIM blames Monday's BlackBerry outage on a faulty upgrade

Monday's three-hour BlackBerry e-mail outage now has an official excuse from Research In Motion: a software upgrade in its main servers gone horribly wrong.

This explanation should be familiar, as it is the same one BlackBerry users received for a previous outage last April. Since RIM only issues public statements regarding outages upon specific request, according to the New York Times, details of this incident are characteristically vague.

A statement made yesterday attributed this latest mishap to an "internal data routing system...that had recently been upgraded." The upgrade in question, which included a four-hour time slot in the early morning hours on Sunday, took place just hours before the outage.

In a notification on the BlackBerry Outage mailing list, several system upgrades were announced to unspecified hardware components, databases, and admin systems that would affect BlackBerry Relay service.

Because the majority of RIM's 8 million American clients have to route their e-mails through a single datacenter, many have criticized the Canadian company for not opening at least one more to act as a buffer if it plans to remain a "middleman" in the path from sender to recipient.

As the third outage in under a year, the big question on BlackBerry users' minds is: "Will this happen to me every time RIM wants to upgrade?"

Attempts to contact RIM were not answered as of press time.