RIM Facing Suit Over Blackberry Outage
RIM (Research In Motion Ltd.) will probably be facing a class action lawsuit brought on by consumers who were left frustrated by the BlackBerry maker’s service outage earlier this month.
The suit was filed on Tuesday in Quebec Superior Court by Consumer Law Group Inc., the same group which recently launched a class action suit against Reebok Canada Inc. over the sneaker company’s “Toner” brand of shoes.
According to a statement from the Montreal-based law firm, the proposed class action against RIM is being filed “on behalf of individuals who have BlackBerry smartphones and who pay for a monthly data plan but were unable to access their email, BlackBerry Messenger service (BBM), and/or Internet for the period of October 11 to 14, 2011.”
The full complaint can be downloaded here
In a statement, RIM said it has not yet been served with a copy of the complaint.
“RIM will formally respond to the matter in due course,” a company spokesperson said.
According to the filing, the lead complainant in the case owns a BlackBerry Bold 9300 and is a customer of Rogers Communications Inc. The complainant said he uses RIM’s BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) to communicate with friends in Trinidad, England, Barbados and the United States.
Earlier this month, millions of BlackBerry users in Europe and around the world were unable to access emails, instant messages and Web data from their RIM devices after a core switched failed inside the Waterloo, Ont.-based company’s United Kingdom network operating centre. RIM called the outage the worst in the history of the company
When RIM’s system went down — and the backup system failed to kick in — it caused a chain reaction that saw a backlog of messages build up in other network centres around the world, which started a chain reaction, causing message delays around the world.
While the outage meant some users lost service for several days, other users — for example, in North America — only lost service for a day or so.
RIM has since apologized for the downtime and offered both its consumer and enterprise customers compensation packages as a “thank you” for sticking with the company through a difficult time. RIM has opted to give every BlackBerry user $100 worth of free applications, while RIM’s enterprise clients will each be given one month of free technical support.
In the days immediately after the blackout, several of RIM’s carrier partners — including Spain’s Telefonica and Britain’s Vodafone — revealed they would be looking into various ways of compensating customers for the downtime.
According to the release from Consumer Law Group, the class action focuses on RIM’s “failure to take action to either directly compensate BlackBerry users or to indirectly compensate Blackberry users by arranging for wireless service providers to refunds [sic] their customers and to take full responsibility for those damages.” Consumer Law Group is arguing that RIM has not adequately compensated consumers for the loss of service.
What do you think about the situation, do you think the law suit should take place? How did our BlackBerry readers feel when they could not use the BBM? Tell us what you think and how you would handle the situation.
Source: Financialpost.com
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