RIM faces lawsuits in U.S. and Canada over service outage

Leeky

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Users of RIM's BlackBerry devices are suing the company for its days-long service outage that spread across much of the world earlier in the month. The catastrophic system-wide failure left millions of BlackBerry users in five different continents without email, instant messaging or browsing capabilities on their devices.

Mike Lazaridis, Research in Motion's founder and co-CEO made a public apology via YouTube following the outage. Shortly after that, the company announced that they would be giving BlackBerry customers free apps in compensation for the outage. Apparently this was not enough to satisfy disgruntled users, and many felt the company was painfully slow to update affected consumers in the first place.

A lawsuit (no. CV11-8872) was filed yesterday in a Federal Court in Santa Ana, California on behalf of all U.S. BlackBerry owners to claim compensation if they had active service contracts at the time of the outages. In Canada, another lawsuit was filed in the Quebec Superior Court on behalf of all affected Canadian owners with active service contracts.

Research in Motion failed to compensate BlackBerry users with refunds for loss of service and must "take full responsibility for these damages," one of the filings claims. U.S. plaintiffs are seeking damages including cash compensation for service fees along with attorney's fees and legal expenses.

The U.S. lawsuit was raised by Eric Mitchell of Sherman Oaks, California, a BlackBerry user with an active service contract on Sprint's mobile network. He argued that while he did not pay RIM directly, he did through his mobile carrier and therefore had an implied contract with the embattled phone manufacturer.

The lawsuit argues that because he was unable to use his device during the outages between October 11 and October 14, he was unable to respond to, or use emails and other communications "in real-time, without delay, reducing and interfering with his productivity and causing him damage and loss of money."

The complaint estimates that RIM earns at least $3.4 million per day in service revenue, which is collected from phone owners through the various network carriers. The size of the potential class of U.S. consumers participating in the lawsuit would include 2.4 million California residents alone.

The Canadian phone manufacturer recently reported a steep drop in quarterly profits and is struggling to sell its 800,000 unit stockpile of PlayBook's despite reducing the price twice.

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Customers like this really pee me off they sue a company over something like MSN "Free service" just because they had a problem for a few days not only that buy RIM gave their customers free paid products and yet they still have the cheek to complain about it I mean I just feel as if they want everything handed to them like $10million dollars because a free service went down for a bit. If I had customers like those I would seriously send them to court and destroy them!!!!!
 
I'm pretty certain a day trader or small-business owner would argue that their emails are a little more important than what you call "MSN Free Service."
 
"DokkRokken I'm pretty certain a day trader or small-business owner would argue that their emails are a little more important than what you call "MSN Free Service.""

Well if they use that for their emails they are even more stupid xD atleast use something good like gmail or hotmail or heck their own "business" email that takes like 5minutes to setup which tbh if your a business and don't have your own @something.com then you are a pretty fail business so ye they shouldn't complain unless they use something that is made for emails or use their own service.
 
Guest, you have fail logic, GTFO now!

I completely agree with DokkRokken. Business owner (and not just) who rely on the service would surly consider a ~3 day outage a determent.
So here you are, a customer, who is waiting for ~72 hours to get a response back from the business; this client might not be a customer for much longer.
 
Guest said:
"DokkRokken I'm pretty certain a day trader or small-business owner would argue that their emails are a little more important than what you call "MSN Free Service.""

Well if they use that for their emails they are even more stupid xD atleast use something good like gmail or hotmail or heck their own "business" email that takes like 5minutes to setup which tbh if your a business and don't have your own @something.com then you are a pretty fail business so ye they shouldn't complain unless they use something that is made for emails or use their own service.

The validity of your comment just went out of the door when you associated the word "good" with the word "hotmail" in the same sentence.

If the blackberry mail push went down, it would have been useless for them to have access to their email, whether it would be their own domain, enterprise email or third party emails.

While we are at it, logging onto to your email via your phone browser is not real-time.

However, I truly think that these lawsuits are frivolous and a waste of time/money for the courts.
 
Guest more like you fail GTFOB! I was not being nasty or anything to anyone and your saying stuff like that calm your self! I only stated that why would you sue someone over a pretty much free service and when you only lost what 72hours of service and everyone knew, you also got 1month free + a few free paid apps worth $100 ... tbh I would take that as a massive thank you as other company's arn't even close to that nice so they should think themselves thankful that they are!
 
What a bunch of cry babies. If you want better service go with something better than RIM. Since when did they guarantee they would be 100% Up-time. I hate to see this world when the cell towers go out...Oh no lets sue the sell tower companies...Or the power goes out...lets sue the electric company. Get real people and get a life!
 
HAHA I hope they win and put RIM out of it's misery. RIM is a company on it's last breath!!
 
I love how the lawyers must have just randomly divided up the revenue by number of days to get some totally arbitrary value on how much RIM makes a day. Of course, don't bother to figure out that they make the vast majority of their money on hardware/software sales, NOT on hosting free services like push. So their network went down, big whoop. If you were stupid enough to make your Blackberry the ONLY way to get your emails or information, I'd say that you should sue yourself for not thinking ahead.

Yet another example of the rampant false sense of entitlement in today's society - you chose to rely on a tool, a tool that makes your life easier 362 days a year, and it was only broken for 3 days... Get over it.
 
Yeah well, I hope they sue the crap out of them. Not because of the outage but because I want to see RIM Die! :)
 
And yeah I know what I put isn't mature, but I really do have a dark hatred for the company :( I really can't help myself rip on them. Am I becoming a troll? God I hope not :(
 
You know what I think blackberry phones suck as much as the next guy but the company is providing jobs for lots of ppl and these phones have their place in business roles. So saying you hope the company dies, is the same as saying you hope 1000's of ppl lose their primary source of income. What a nice guy you are.. *****.

As for the lawsuit, NO ONE relies 100% on their phone for emails, the idea is just ridiculous. Even when you travel there is free wifi everywhere that can be used to check your precious emails thats so super urgent. It's just another stupid lawsuit that ranks up there with sueing for burning your mouth on hot coffee.
 
You know what I think blackberry phones suck as much as the next guy but the company is providing jobs for lots of ppl and these phones have their place in business roles. So saying you hope the company dies, is the same as saying you hope 1000's of ppl lose their primary source of income. What a nice guy you are.. *****.

I think you'll find RIM are reducing those jobs, they announced the cutting of 2,000 jobs worldwide in July. Read here for more information.

I personally feel that RIM have a good idea in their encrypted network, but it has to be capable of handling the usage from its customers. It is no good forcing mobile carriers to use BlackBerry Internet Servers to serve the web browsers, email (including push) and instant messaging systems of their handsets if its going to continually break. It doesn't matter who you are, it shouldn't of ever happened. All I ever seem to hear from disgruntled users of Blackberry's these days are how the things are continually, although intermittently not working.

Blackberry are certainly riding the waves at the moment as well. The very recent announcement of delays to key aspects of its intended OS upgrade to Playbook's has left owners and the industry angry, and the tablets themselves are not selling despite two price reductions. Having over half a million reported in stock is not going to help the financial situation of the company either.

At the end of the day they can ill afford incidents like the collapse of their networks when stocks are crashing and customer satisfaction are reaching all time lows.
 
lipe123 said:As for the lawsuit, NO ONE relies 100% on their phone for emails, the idea is just ridiculous. Even when you travel there is free wifi everywhere that can be used to check your precious emails thats so super urgent. It's just another stupid lawsuit that ranks up there with sueing for burning your mouth on hot coffee.

All the journalists I work with are literally tied to their Blackberry's and the email service. Contacting business and government officials for statements requires lots of back-and-forth exchanges that are done through email. Interviews are often scheduled using email. And it has to be done quickly, instead of finding the nearest hotspot.

That's just one career. I can imagine that scenario applies to many others. But hey, I guess emails are somehow not 'super urgent' in the business world.
 
Even if the lawsuits are successful the end consumers won't get much in return. The lawyers on the other hand will do quite nicely.
 
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