Consumers in the United States and Canada have sued Research In Motion (RIM) for service outages for days long recently on BlackBerry devices that rippled across the world. The system wide failures of the services had left tens of millions of frustrated Blackberry users on five continents without email, instant messaging and browsing.
RIM’s co CEO had apologized to millions of BlackBerry customers for the 4 day outage that tarnished the company’s image and set back its drive to catch up with Apple and other smartphones rivals. The Canadian lawsuit, filed in Quebec Superior Court, was brought on behalf of all Canadian BlackBerry owners with an active service agreement. The US lawsuit was brought by a resident of California, who did not sign a service contract directly with RIM but he paid the company fees for BlackBerry device through a mobile carrier Sprint. He therefore had an implied contract. It accuses RIM of breach of contract, negligence and unjust enrichment.
Because of the global service outages that began on October 11, 2011 and continued till 14th October, 2011, the complaintant was unable to use emails and other communications in real time, and interfering with his productivity and causing damage and loss of money. The complaintant paid for service but he did not receive it, the lawsuit said. US plaintiffs are seeking damages including cash compensation for service fees along-with attorney’s fees and legal expenses.
Just imagine, the similar situation in India. Although the services were disrupted in India also but no BlackBerry user has dared to file suit against them in India but everybody know how difficult it is to fight legally here and multinational companies take full advantage of this in India.
