BlackBerry Outage Prompts Class Action Lawsuits In U.S., Canada
The suits were filed in RIM's home country of Canada in Quebec Superior Court and in the U.S. in a federal district court in Santa Ana, Calif., on behalf of customers enraged by the outage and insulted by RIM's offer of free premium apps and technical support in the BlackBerry outage's wake.
Starting on October 10, BlackBerry users in Europe, the Middle East and Africa started experiencing service disruptions on their BlackBerry smartphones and mobile e-mail and other messages weren't being sent or received. After a couple of days, the BlackBerry blackout stretched to North America, conking out service to the U.S., Canada and Latin America.
RIM vowed to work around the cloud to fix the BlackBerry outage and restore service, which was restored in full after four days of disruptions. During the downtime, RIM said restoring service was priority No. 1 and RIM leaders issued somber apologies for the BlackBerry outage.
RIM blamed the outage on a core switch failure in Europe and a faulty failover system that didn't back up service once the core switch went down.
Once service was restored to normal levels, RIM offered affected BlackBerry users free premium apps from its BlackBerry World app store and a free month of BlackBerry technical support.
Some users, however, said that wasn't enough, and have filed suits that claim RIM didn't do enough to make good with affected users.
In the Canadian suit, filed by Montreal law firm the Consumer Law Group on behalf of "all residents in Canada who have a BlackBerry smartphone and who pay for a monthly data plan but were unable to access their e-mail, BlackBerry Messenger service (BBM), and/or internet for the period of October 11 to 14, 2011."
The suit looks for prorated compensation for BlackBerry users affected by the outage, based on their monthly services charges and says RIM's offer of free apps and technical support doesn't quell the firestorm. The suit also claims that RIM has failed to "take full responsibility for these damages."
Meanwhile, a similar class action suit filed in California by Eric Mitchell of Sherman Oaks, Calif. claims that the outage made it impossible for him to use BlackBerry e-mail and other communications "in real-time, without delay, reducing and interfering with his productivity and causing him damage and loss of money." That suit claims Mitchell paid for a service that he did not receive, according to a Reuters report.
The U.S. suit asks for damages that include cash compensation for service fees and legal costs.