RIM battles for reputation after European outage rocks shares
BLACKBERRY maker Research in Motion (RIM) is under pressure to restore its reputation after users across Europe faced a three-hour outage last Friday.
Its shares closed down over six per cent last week, close to their lowest level in nine years, as the firm prepared to release its latest quarterly results this week.
RIM’s chief executive, Thorsten Heins, issued an apology to BlackBerry users who were affected. He said as much as six per cent of its customer base – around five million users – may have experienced email delays of as long as three hours.
RIM suffered a similar outage last October that left tens of millions of frustrated BlackBerry users on five continents without email, instant messaging and browsing. RIM has 78m subscribers but has seen its market share shrink as rival firms’ products gain ground.