Blackberry Users to Sue RIM for Outages
Customers still angry about the service outages they experienced last month on their BlackBerry smartphones are suing Research In Motion (RIM) for failing to financially compensate them.
A Canadian law firm, Consumer Law Group (CLG) has taken up the case at the Quebec Superior Court and filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of the Blackberry consumers.
Jeff Orenstein, one of the attorneys on the case, clarified that the lawsuit does not concern inconvenience charges, which could more easily be denied by the smartphone company. Instead, they are focusing on RIM’s failure to refund and provide compensation for people who were unable to access their email, the internet, or the messenger over a three day period last month.
Get Our Latest News for FREE
The service problems were reported on all continents, from North America to Europe, Asia and Africa, stretching from Oct. 11 to Oct. 14. A core switch failure was blamed for the problems, along with an unsuccessful failover to a back-up switch.
The lawsuit was also filed on behalf of all U.S. Blackberry customers by Eric Mitchell of Sherman Oaks, Calif. The case they say is straight forward - RIM failed to act on the service problems it was experiencing and the users were not properly compensated.
RIM has come out with a statement describing the worldwide outages as “unfortunate.” Co-CEO Mike Laziridis stated: "We restored full services as quickly as we could. Now we're working on root cause analysis and we're focused on making this right for BlackBerry users around the world.”
The company did attempt to offer an apology to its customers with a giveaway of apps worth over US$100, and offered a month of free technical support. The gestures were deemed to not be good enough by many of Blackberry’s users, who are now committed to taking the case the court and getting some real money back.
