loyal BlackBerry customers for their patience

Last week, BlackBerry users experienced a service disruption that in some countries lasted three days. Said to have affected their entire customer base of 70 million users, the outage lasted for one day in the U.S., 1.5 days in Latin America and Canada and for about three days in Europe, the Middle East, India and Africa. To compensate users for their inconvenience and frustration, Research in Motion (RIM) is offering users $100 in free premium apps between now and the end of the year.

“We are grateful to our loyal BlackBerry customers for their patience,” said RIM Co-CEO Mike 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.”