RIM Offers Premium Apps to Compensate for Four-Day Outage

From DailyTech: Last week, a four-day outage of BlackBerry services left millions of users with email, browsing and instant messaging troubles, but Research In Motion (RIM) is sending an apology in the form of free apps to make up for the disruption.

On October 10, BlackBerry customers in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa began experiencing problems with their messaging, browsing and email services. RIM blamed the service troubles on an extremely critical network failure. On Tuesday, the outage spread to South America and Asia, and on Wednesday, the United States and Canada.

There are an estimated 70 million BlackBerry users worldwide.

RIM's BlackBerry service update confirmed that services began to operate normally on Thursday, October 13. RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis released an apology video on RIM's website saying that it is the company's goal to provide a reliable communications network, but "did not deliver on that goal this week." RIM Chief Information Officer Robin Bienfait offered an apology on the RIM website as well.

But RIM knew an apology probably wasn't going to fully compensate for the four days of unreliable service. Many use BlackBerry devices for work, and can't perform well when the device cannot perform well either.

Now, RIM announced this morning that it will provide a selection of premium apps for BlackBerry users to download for free starting Wednesday, October 19.

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