(KEN MACHARIA) BlackBerry subscribers will enjoy free access to premium apps following service interruptions that affected customers in five continents last week. RIM Co-CEO, Mike Lazaridis announced the offer as an expression of appreciation for their patience during the disruptions.
BlackBerry email, web and messaging services were restored on Thursday after nearly four days of an outage that affected millions of BlackBerry users in Europe, Africa, Latin-America, US, Middle-east and India. It is estimated three million BlackBerry customers, including over 18,000 subscribers in Kenya were unable to send or receive emails.
“Our global network supports the communications needs of more than 70 million customers,” said 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.”
RIM, however, has not given the reason for the interruption, but UK’s The Telegraph reported reported all the affected areas are served by a data server in southern England. It is believed the server failed as a result of a backlog of email messages especially in Europe.
The premium apps, which will only be free for three months, will become available to download at BlackBerry App World over a period of four weeks beginning Wednesday, October 19th.
In addition, RIM’s enterprise customers will also be offered 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.
“We are grateful to our loyal BlackBerry customers for their patience,” added 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.”
The premium apps that are on offer include:
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
DriverSafe.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
