The co-CEO of BlackBerry maker Research in Motion is making only a brief reference to last week's outages as he opened a conference for software programmers in San Francisco.

Mike Lazaridis says the outages were "unfortunate." He said Tuesday that the company restored service as quickly as possible and is working on figuring out the causes and "making this right" for BlackBerry users worldwide.

On Monday, BlackBerry tried to soothe tens of millions of frustrated customers by offering more than $100 worth of free software to each one and giving some a month of technical support.

After briefly addressing the outage, Lazaridis introduced an upcoming operating system called BBX, which combines elements of BlackBerry's existing system with those of a previously announced QNX operating system for phones and tablet computers.