Mike Lazaridis, who is RIM’s (or Research In Motion’s) co-CEO, has taken to the internet and issued a full public apology to all the BlackBerry subscribers who have been experiencing issues with the BBM and internet service being down for over 3 days now.
In a video posted on RIM’s official YouTube page, Lazaridis states: “I apologise for the service outages this week,” and that “We’ve let many of you down.”
The apology is likely to be little compensation for BBM users across the globe and with news that the outages are spreading to the U.S. and other countries, it would seem that the issue is far from resolved.
UK customers are seeing an improvement as the BBM service is slowly returning to normal, but there is still no dedicated fix for the errors and there is increasing pressure to fix the outstanding issues before we enter the weekend. Some customers are still without web browsing in the UK, and some are experiencing serious delays with email.
In the apology Mike Lazaridis uses many well known apologetic figures of speech which you would usually expect to hear about a business-customer relationship, such as “You expect better from us. And I expect better from us.”, “We’ve let many of you down” and “Ill work to restore your trust in us” but until we see the issue fixed it’s hard to take the apology on-board.
However, in the video Lazaridis does give as much of an update as they can on the process and states “We are working around the clock to fix this“ and that they are “ now approaching normal BlackBerry service levels in Europe, the Middle East, India and Africa”.
Normal service will resume after the issue that was initially started by a core switch failure and then extended by a large backlog of data that needs to be cleared before service can return to normal.
Either way we would hope that the issue is fixed before the week is out and then just see what BlackBerry does to appease its millions of angry customers, many of whom are clamouring to get compensation for the money spent on an internet service that hasn’t worked.
Have you managed to get any sort of compensation from BlackBerry or your network? Let us know your thoughts on our comments below or via our @Gadget_Helpline Twitter page or Official Facebook group.