RIM weighing up customer compensation for BlackBerry outage

RIM looking at customer compensation for BlackBerry outage
Will RIM cough up for BlackBerry downtime?

RIM's co-CEO's Mike Lazaridis and Jim Ballsillie have confirmed that all BlackBerry services are now fully operational, and that the company is looking into customer compensation.

Speaking at a hastily convened press conference to deal with the fallout from the recent BlackBerry outage, Lazaridis apologised again for the problems and said the failure was caused by a protection switch in the servers failed, which created a mail backlog that toppled the service.

RIM also pointed out that the service has been operational for 99.7% of the time over the last 18 months, although how much that will appease the millions of angry BlackBerry customers is hard to tell.

We want our money back

When probed about compensation for the consumers that paid for an unobtainable service, Ballsillie said the issue was "something we plan to come back to these customers on very, very soon."

The issue of deciding how much compensation, and how to offer it, is a tricky one, given there's no easy way of evaluating how much disruption each user was caused.

Oh, and one final piece of advice from the @UK_BlackBerry Twitter feed: "If you are still experiencing any delays with messaging or browsing, please try rebooting your phone by the battery removing then reinserting."

We wonder if anyone tried the same thing with the servers...

Via Mashable

Gareth Beavis
Formerly Global Editor in Chief

Gareth has been part of the consumer technology world in a career spanning three decades. He started life as a staff writer on the fledgling TechRadar, and has grown with the site (primarily as phones, tablets and wearables editor) until becoming Global Editor in Chief in 2018. Gareth has written over 4,000 articles for TechRadar, has contributed expert insight to a number of other publications, chaired panels on zeitgeist technologies, presented at the Gadget Show Live as well as representing the brand on TV and radio for multiple channels including Sky, BBC, ITV and Al-Jazeera. Passionate about fitness, he can bore anyone rigid about stress management, sleep tracking, heart rate variance as well as bemoaning something about the latest iPhone, Galaxy or OLED TV.