BlackBerry offers free apps after outage

MONTREAL — BlackBerry maker Research in Motion offered customers free apps on Monday after millions of users worldwide suffered service outages last week.

RIM said customers would be able to download for free a selection of its premium applications “worth a total value of more than $100” including games, hands-free operating programs and other tools “as an expression of appreciation.”

Users will have until the end of the year to avail themselves of the offer.

RIM’s network services for the popular smartphone were down intermittently for up to three days last week in western Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and North and South America.

RIM blamed the failure of a “core switch” at a facility in Europe as well as a backup mechanism for the initial problem, knocking out emails and messaging for users.

The problems cascaded as emails backed up at the company’s server hubs.

“We are grateful to our loyal BlackBerry customers for their patience,” said RIM co-chief executive Mike Lazaridis in a statement.

“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.”

RIM has some 70 million BlackBerry subscribers worldwide, with many companies and governments depending on their networks and phones for internal communications.

The company has faced challenges from other aggressive smartphone makers, especially Apple’s iPhone, though RIM’s security-tight networks still remain preferred by businesses.

But Ian Lee, a professor at the Sprott School of Business at Carleton University, warned last week that business users could flee BlackBerry if these are seen as no longer reliable.

“These meltdowns are just the worst thing you can do in the corporate world because businessmen expect reliability,” he said. “They don’t want excuses.”

“Their competitive strength has been in the corporate market, or enterprise market, and such outages are causing these customers to take a second look at competitors.