WATERLOO, Ontario, April 20 (UPI) -- BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd. said Friday an insufficiently tested software update caused a North American outage that blocked millions of e-mails.
The outage Tuesday night through Wednesday morning "was triggered by the introduction of a new, non-critical system routine that was designed to provide better optimization of the (BlackBerry e-mail) system's cache," RIM said in a statement.
The cache is an area of computer memory devoted to the high-speed retrieval of frequently used or requested data.
"The system routine was expected to be non-impacting with respect to the real-time operation of the BlackBerry infrastructure, but the pre-testing of the system routine proved to be insufficient," RIM said.
The Waterloo, Ontario, company said the process designed to maintain service during a failure "did not fully perform to RIM's expectations," causing a further delay before service was restored.
RIM said it "definitively" ruled out security and capacity issues, as well as hardware failure or core software issues, as the disruption's cause.
It said it would improve its testing, monitoring and recovery processes to prevent such an outage from recurring.
