WATERLOO, Ont. – BlackBerry smartphone email, texting and Internet services are back to normal after four days of outages around the world.

Mike
Lazaridis, co-CEO of Research In Motion, the company behind
the popular smartphone device, said Thursday that services have been
fully restored.

“All the services are back up globally,” he said on a conference call to discuss the outage.

Lazaridis spoke on the call alongside fellow co-CEO Jim Balsillie in a rare appearance of both executives together.

“You should know we are taking immediate and aggressive steps to prevent this from happening again,” said Lazaridis.

“We’re committed to restoring the trust of our loyal BlackBerry customers that we’ve worked to hard to earn over the years.”

RIM has about 70 million BlackBerry
subscribers around the world. Technical problems linked to switching
problems affected services for millions of customers in North America,
Europe, the Middle East and Africa in recent days

Lazaridis has
launched a public campaign to apologize for the lengthy outage, speaking
on both the conference call as well as posting a video to the YouTube
website promising further updates.

RIM said a hardware failure caused a ripple effect in its system when a switch designed to protect its infrastructure failed.

Balsillie
said the outage has nothing to do with the company scaling back its
workforce. The company recently cut more than 2,000 jobs.