BlackBerry Service Is Restored As RIM Co-CEOs Field Questions

In a press conference held today RIM co-CEOs Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie confirmed that BlackBerry service has been restored worldwide, and users will be receiving all of their delayed emails and messages shortly.

Other than that the press conference was light on answers, mostly because it seems RIM’s upper brass don’t have any yet. In fairness, they’ve had a lot on their plate during the past few days. Lazaridis was reportedly overseeing the response team himself, and only managed to tear himself away from the goings-on early this morning.

The outage was the largest in RIM’s history, and the company is still trying to figure out why the backup system didn’t kick in when the core switch failed and knocked out service on three continents. Not exactly heartening news for the millions of BlackBerry users who were stuck without data service for over three days.

The pair was also asked if the company’s network woes could have been brought about by a spate of recent layoffs. Balsillie and Lazaridis quickly denied any connection.

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The issue of compensating customers was raised a few times thanks to scores of upset BlackBerry fans taking their complaints to Twitter. Thanks to the outage, many once-ardent users are now considering switching to other platforms, something the already-ailing RIM can’t really handle.

Lazaridis and Balsillie admitted that the service issues have affected customers’ trust in the BlackBerry brand, but wouldn’t go into specifics about compensating affected users other than mentioning that it was a “priority.”

The press conference came right on the heels of a video apology filmed by Lazaridis.