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Outrage Over Outage: Class Action Lawsuit Against BlackBerry Maker Demands Consumers Get Their Money Back
Photo by Ethan boisvert via Shutterstock
BlackBerry users were outraged over a recent service outage that left customers out of touch for three days, and now consumers in the U.S. and Canada are filing class action lawsuits against Research in Motion, the telecommunications company that makes the popular smartphones. Are you among the deeply inconvenienced who want their money back?
The U.S. lawsuit was filed in Santa Ana, California Wednesday, and was "brought on behalf of all US BlackBerry owners with an active service agreement at the time of the email, internet and messaging interruptions," reports the Guardian. The lawsuit "accuses RIM of breach of contract, negligence and unjust enrichment." Ouch! Behind the suit is Eric Mitchell of Sherman Oaks, California, who justifies going after RIM by claiming his fees for his BlackBerry and Sprint contract go to RIM, making it an "implied contract."
Sure, RIM said "sorry" to their loyal "CrackBerry" users, but for many, sorry just isn't cutting it. Besides, that apology didn't come with any refunds. Mitchell's class action suit is seeking compensation for service fees and legal costs.
Naturally, BlackBerry users took to the interwebs to bitch about losing service (of course, they would have had to have used another device, since they were SOL with their smartphones), and some of the bitterness (or Apple iPhone user snark) ended up being pretty damn funny. Mashable has a slideshow of select Twitticisms, i.e. "By far the worst part of this #blackberry outage is that I have to admit I have a Blackberry." (They missed this iPhone snarkery, though, credited to @alexparish: "HOT TIP: Turn your iPhone into a Blackberry by selecting Airplane Mode.")
Canadians also turned on their own, and filed their own suit against Canada's RIM.
Of course, it was around the tail-end of the RIM outage when Apple debuted the iPhone 4s, which may have proven to BlackBerry users to be a far more tempting piece of fruit cellular technology.
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