RIM Gives Free Apps, Support In BlackBerry Outage Wake

last week's massive BlackBerry outage

The apps, worth a total value of more than $100, will be made available to customers over the coming weeks in BlackBerry App World and will remain available until December 31.

The free premium app offer comes after millions of BlackBerry users suffered e-mail and messaging issues and service interruptions, some for as many as three days, in the largest Blackberry outage since the Canadian mobile pioneer launched in 1999.

The BlackBerry outage started on Monday, Oct. 10 in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The BlackBerry outage later spread to the U.S., Canada and Latin America.

BlackBerry said service interruptions lasted roughly three days in Europe, the Middle East, India and Africa; 1.5 days in Latin America and Canada; and one day in the U.S. Service levels had returned to normal by the end of last week, RIM said.

RIM launched an around the clock effort to fix the outage, which it said was sparked by a core switch failure in Europe and the failover mechanisms in place, which had worked in previous testing, also failed, the company has said.

"Our global network supports the communications needs of more than 70 million customers," said RIM Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis in a statement. "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."

According to RIM, the smartphone maker will offer the completely selection of premium apps for a four week period starting Wednesday. More apps will follow, RIM said. This first set will feature: SIMS 3, Bejeweled, N.O.V.A., Texas Hold'em Poker 2, Bubble Bash 2, Photo Editor Ultimate, DriveSafe.ly Pro, iSpeech Translator Pro, Drive Safe.ly Enterprise, Nobex Radio Premium, Shazam Encore and Vlingo Plus: Virtual Assistant.

Along with free premium apps, RIM is offering customers a free one-month extension of their Technical Support contract. And for customers who do not have Technical Support, they will be offered free one-month trial of RIM's BlackBerry Technical Support Services - Enhanced Support.

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