Tech upgrade blamed for BlackBerry crash

NEW YORK: After two days of silence about a lengthy outage in its BlackBerry e-mail service, the company that makes the addictive mobile device issued a jargon-laden update indicating that a minor software upgrade had crashed the system.

The statement late Thursday night by Research in Motion Ltd. said the outage from Tuesday evening into Wednesday morning was triggered by “the introduction of a new, non-critical system routine” designed to optimize the cache, or temporary memory, on the computer servers that run the BlackBerry network.

RIM said, “the pre-testing of the system routine proved to be insufficient.” The failed upgrade apparently set off a domino effect of glitches, which the company referred to as “a compounding series of interaction errors between the system’s operational database and cache.”

The Canadian company said a “failover process” to switch to a backup system “did not fully perform to RIM’s expectations.” That led to a delay in restoring service and “processing the resulting message queue,” a reference to the backlog of undelivered e-mail that accumulated up during the outage.