Blackberry Failure is Insufficiently Tested Software Upgrade

Blackberry wireless email device-maker says an insufficiently tested software upgrade was the cause of this week's network failure.

There are about eight million Blackberry users around the world.  This week, Blackberry's US and North American users lost their service for two days as a result of the problem.

Research In Motion (RIM) said it was now looking to improve its testing and recovery processes to prevent such an outage happening again.

Blackberry said in a statement that the failure was trigged by "the introduction of a new, non-critical system routine" designed to increase the system's e-mail holding space.

It admitted that "the pre-testing of the system routine proved to be insufficient".