RIM faces lawsuits as customers demand compensation for BlackBerry outage

RIM is facing lawsuits in the US and Canada from angry customers demanding compensation for the recent global outage of the firm's BlackBerry service, as things go from bad to worse for the Canadian smartphone maker.

The class action suit filed in Montreal relates to customers who "were unable to access their email, BlackBerry Messenger service and/or internet for the period of October 11 to 14 2011".

"Despite the fact that [RIM] is responsible for BlackBerry users' loss of email, BBM, and/or internet service for approximately one and a half days, it has not compensated consumers for such loss of use, knowing full well BlackBerry users pay a monthly fee to their wireless service providers for data services and that they were deprived thereof", the filing continued.

For its part, RIM said it had not been served with a complaint as of yet.

"RIM will formally respond to the matter in due course," the firm added in a statement.

The outage occurred after a switch failure brought down a server at RIM's Slough datacentre. It lasted over three days in Europe and hit the Middle East and South America as the interrupted service caused a backlog of messages across the globe.

RIM has since offered customers a selection of apps worth over $100 if they download them before December, while enterprise customers have been offered one month's free technical support.

RIM founder Mike Lazaridis apologised for the outage in a special message posted online, after widespread criticism of the firm's slow response to the incident and lack of communication.

However, this does not appear to have satisfied some North American customers, as a suit has reportedly been filed in the US.

Craig Cartier, ICT consultant at analyst Frost & Sullivan, argued that the Canadian suit could be even more demanding of RIM if it also considered "inconvenience costs or punitive damages".

"In an era of public discontent with overzealous lawyers, that claim seems refreshingly reasonable, and if RIM wasn't considering this refund anyway, they should," he told V3.

The news is yet another set back for RIM as the company seeks to put the outage behind it and rebuild confidence in its services.

Earlier this week RIM announced the addition of Office 365 support for BlackBerry devices, and unveiled the much-hyped BBX operating system at the BlackBerry DevCon conference last week.