Research In Motion says it's ensuring that a massive outage of its BlackBerry e-mail service - like the one that hit thousands of North American users for 12 hours last week - doesn't happen again.

That won't reassure fuming subscribers who accuse RIM of being less than forthcoming and they're not happy about the glib assurance from RIM co-chief executive Jim Balsillie: "It was an outage overnight when there was an upgrade."

Balsillie ruled out as causes too much traffic or security, blaming a new storage feature that had not been properly tested.

That's one interpretation of the gobbledegook in RIM's explanatory statement: "The new system routine produced an unexpected impact and triggered a compounding series of interaction errors between the system's operational database and cache. After isolating the resulting database problem and unsuccessfully attempting to correct it, RIM began its failover process to a backup system.

"Although the backup system and failover process had been repeatedly and successfully tested previously, the failover process did not fully perform to RIM's expectations in this situation and therefore caused further delay in restoring service and processing the resulting message queue."

CEOs, pollies and other crackberries aren't techos and are making noises that compensation would be a better way of saying sorry.

A T Mobile employee who works for the US Carrier said "A lot of customers are upset. Many have already switched to a Windows Mobile device and we anticipate thousands more to follow"