Airtel Compensates its BlackBerry Users in Nigeria after Global Outage

Airtel announced today that it will offer its BlackBerry customers a service waiver following last week’s global outage attributed to the service provider, Research in Motion (RIM).

Research in Motion has now fully restored data services to its BlackBerry devices. The BlackBerry outage was caused by a hardware error which halted messaging and Web browsing across many parts of the world, disrupting services for 3 days. The disruptions began in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and India early in the week and later spread to North America.

Mr. Rajan Swaroop, the Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director of Airtel Nigeria stated: “We remain concerned about the inconvenience this has caused to all our BlackBerry users earlier this week and we would like to compensate both our pre-paid and post-paid customers for the inconvenience as best we can.

“For our pre-paid customers, we will extend the subscription of the services for the month of October by three days. We are communicating this to the affected customers through sms.”

Swaroop added, “For our Post Paid customers, who are customers paying their bills at the end of every month, we will waive three days off the BlackBerry monthly rental for the month of October. The three day waiver will be reflected in the monthly bill sent to all our post paid BlackBerry users for the month of October.”

Airtel clarified that although the root cause emanated from the global provider of the services, the telco service provider was willing to offer the extension as a token compensation for its customers.