RIM messed up and nearly destroyed Western civilization with the great BlackBerry Outage of 2007 earlier this week. We now know the reason for the catastrophe: buggy software. RIM installed an untested piece of caching software that wasn’t quite up to snuff. The cache and the company’s database fought tooth and nail, leaving middle management types in some kind of panic.

The moral of the story is never to install untested software, enterprise versions or otherwise. Oh, and to stop being so addicted to e-mail. Both are equally good lessons.

R.I.M. Offers a Reason for BlackBerry Failure [New York Times]