Last week, Blackberry suffered service outages that affected millions of users all across the globe. Unsurprisingly, people found this to be anywhere from a minor to a significant annoyance – as functionality was affected in different ways for different people.
Most saw some sort of outage in web browsing, email or BlackBerry messenger.
On Monday, users in Europe, Africa and The Middle East began experiencing issues – and by early Wednesday the problems had spread to the Americas. American BlackBerry users began reporting outages during the wee hours on Twitter and Facebook.
Services were slowly restored in the following days, and RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis issued a YouTube apology to BlackBerry users, saying that “we let many of you down.”
Now, those affected BlackBerry users learn what RIM plans to give them for their troubles: Free apps.
A selection of premium apps will become free on the BlackBerry App World in the upcoming weeks, and they will remain free for the rest of 2011. Here’s the current list of apps that will be free to all users:
- 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
- Speech Translator Pro – iSpeech.org
- Drive Safe.ly Enterprise – iSpeech.org
- Nobex Radio™ Premium – Nobex
- Shazam Encore – Shazam
- Vlingo Plus: Virtual Assistant – Vlingo
According to RIM, there are more apps to come. When it’s all said and done, there will be over $100 worth of free apps available to users.
RIM’s enterprise customers will also be receiving on month of free enhanced tech support.
“We are grateful to our loyal BlackBerry customers for their patience,” said Lazaridis. “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.”
Will a handful of free apps be enough to fix the damage that has been caused by the outage? There’s no doubt that some users will be disappointed, and would prefer some sort of monetary reimbursement.
The backlash on social media channels has been pretty severe. Plus, it was a bad week for BlackBerry to crap out – with Apple releasing iOS 5 and the iPhone 4S.
Are you a BlackBerry user? Is this apology package enough to make up for the trouble last week’s outage caused? Let us know in the comments.