BlackBerry maker Research in Motion (RIM) is offering customers affected by the outage that dominated most of last week premium apps worth US$100 instead of cash by way of an apology.
First users in Europe and the Middle East, then the Americas, were hit by an outage that began Monday and concluded Friday. The outage was caused by a failure in a back-up server at the company’s Slough data centre in the UK.
During the outage users could not access the web, send email or BBMs.
The company said today that it would be offering a selection of premium apps worth a total value of more than US $100 to subscribers “as an expression of appreciation for their patience during the recent service disruptions.”
The apps will be made available to customers over the coming weeks on BlackBerry App World and will continue to be available until 31 December.
RIM’s enterprise customers will also be offered one month of free Technical Support. Current customers will be offered a complimentary one month extension of their existing Technical Support contract, and customers who do not currently have a Technical Support contract will be offered a one month trial of RIM’s BlackBerry Technical Support Services – Enhanced Support, free of charge.
“Our global network supports the communications needs of more than 70 million customers,” said RIM Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis.
“We truly appreciate and value our relationship with our customers. We’ve worked hard to earn their trust over the past 12 years, and we’re committed to providing the high standard of reliability they expect, today and in the future,” Lazardis said.
The complete selection of premium apps will become available to download at BlackBerry App World over a period of four weeks beginning Wednesday, October 19th.
The selections over this period will include the following (with 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
