RIM offers free apps for outage victims

Research in Motion (RIM) today announced a variety of applications will be offered free of charge to subscribers, rewarding them for their patience during the recent widespread service disruptions.

Last week, many customers experienced interruptions and delays in service over a period of three days in Europe, the Middle East, India and Africa, and for around one day in Latin America, Canada and the United States.

"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," said RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis.

We are taking immediate and aggressive steps to help prevent something like this from happening again.

Global teams worked around the clock to try to minimise the impact on customers, ending the issues on Thursday 13 October.

As an expression of gratitude to customers, the apps, with a value more than $100, will be made available to download in the coming weeks on Blackberry App World. The apps will be accessible until 31 December 2011, RIM said.

The selection of free apps includes SIMS 3, Bejeweled, Texas Hold'em Poker 2, Photo Editor Ultimate, iSpeech Translator Pro and Shazam Encore, amongst many others.

Along with the availability of free apps, RIM enterprise customers will be offered one-month's free technical support. Current customers will be offered a free one-month extension of their existing technical support contract, and customers who do not have a contract will be offered a one-month free trial of the support system.

"We are grateful to our loyal BlackBerry customers for their patience," added Lazaridis. "We have apologised 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."

Read on for our look at how RIM's service outages shook confidence not just in its brand, but in mobile working too.