The outage that RIM experienced last week was certainly not expected, nor pleasant for customers. In Canada we were lucky as BlackBerry users were only without access to emails/BBM for just over a day, other countries such as Europe, the Middle East, India and Africa were without service for over 3 days. The outage was caused by a core switch failure and was completely resolved early Thursday morning. A recent report estimated the downtime would have cost RIM over $100 million, but customers – consumer and business – were curious how they’d be compensated for their frustration.

In a press release this morning RIM said “as an expression of appreciation for their patience during the recent service disruptions” they will give impacted customers a selection of apps valued at $100 (USD). In addition, enterprise customers will also be given 1-month of free enhanced technical support.

Doesn’t this remind you of the Apple iPhone 4 “Antennagate” occurred? Apple was running in every direction to calm the storm of people loosing reception due to the “death grip”. At the end of the date the millions of frustrated and loyal customers were given a free case.

RIM noted that the “selection of premium apps” will be available staring this Wednesday until December 31, 2011. The complete list has about 12 apps, but there are “more to come”:

- SIMS 3 – Electronic Arts
- Bejeweled – Electronic Arts
- N.O.V.A. – Gameloft
- Texas Hold’em Poker 2 – Gameloft
- Bubble Bash 2 – Gameloft
- Photo Editor Ultimate – Ice Cold Apps
- DriveSafe.ly Pro – iSpeech.org
- iSpeech Translator Pro – iSpeech.org
- Drive Safe.ly Enterprise – iSpeech.org
- Nobex Radio Premium – Nobex
- Shazam Encore – Shazam
- Vlingo Plus: Virtual Assistant – Vlingo

Mike Lazaridis, RIM co-CEO, said “We are grateful to our loyal BlackBerry customers for their patience. We have apologized to our customers and we will work tirelessly to restore their confidence. We are taking immediate and aggressive steps to help prevent something like this from happening again.”
[MS]

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