VIDEO: Blackberry Founder Apologizes

Thursday, 13 October 2011 | by Pat's Picks

What bad timing for RIM. It’s never good when millions of your users can’t use their BlackBerrys due to an outage, but it’s even worse when it happens to coincide with the very successful launch of the latest iPhone. The Wall Street Journal says a “crisis mounts” with the company’s worst-ever service failure.

The New York Times says “agitated” investors are calling for new leadership at the company. The Newark Star-Ledger says Blackberry users were looking at iPhone owners with envy yesterday.

And in Washington, the unthinkable happened. The Blackberry outage forced Capitol Hill staffers to “talk to one another without looking down at their palms every 30 seconds,” reports the Washington Post.

Company founder Mike Lazaridis posted an apologetic YouTube video today, saying service should be back to normal soon, but admitting the company failed in its core promise of reliability.