RIM CEO: Our Bad

Mike Lazaridis issues a mea culpa for a service outage that has disrupted BlackBerry communications around the world.

Research In Motion CEO Mike Lazaridis issued a video on the BlackBerry-maker's website this morning to apologize to customers around the world for a four-day-long service disruption. BlackBerry Messenger and the smartphones' email service have been intermittently offline in every continent on the planet since Monday, causing some serious public-relations damage to a company that's already faced record losses in value this year. The outages were caused by "core switch failures" in the BlackBerry network's infrastructure, leading Lazaridis to say the company had "failed" to provide the real-time, global communication that has been his company's goal since its inception in Waterloo, Ont., in 1984. The CEO said service has been restored across much of the world as of this morning.