Airtel Africa compensates its BlackBerry users after global outage |17 October 2011

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 last week and later spread to North America. 

Tsiresy Randriamampionona, the managing director for Seychelles, said: “We remain concerned about the inconvenience this has caused to all our BlackBerry users earlier (last) week and we would like to compensate our post paid customers for the inconvenience as best we can.

“For them; 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,” Mr Randriamampionona said.

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.

Contributed