Research in Motion (RIM) has issued a statement explaining that its network failure earlier this week was down to the introduction of an improved caching system, which shouldn't have impacted regular operation, and the failure of its backup systems.

Only users of the Canadian Network Operations Centre were affected by Tuesday's failure - BlackBerry addicts in Europe, Africa and the Middle East use a second NOC located in the UK, so could still get their fix of 24-hour communications.

The system was back up and running by Wednesday morning, but emails were trickled out over the next 24 hours, probably to prevent overloading other systems.

RIM will no doubt take some stick for the failure, but customers will generally tolerate one slip-up of this type, as long as there's no reoccurrence. ®