BlackBerry subscribers suffered a 4-day service outage a couple of weeks ago.   The incident led to a mob of angry customers as most of them are from the business sector. The outage cost both end users and RIM a lot of money, but now RIM is facing a class action lawsuit from its North American customers.

RIM CEO Mike Lazaridis issued an apology to all their subscribers affected by the outage, and offered free premium apps valued at $100 until December and free tech support for those enterprise subscribers.  But free apps and tech support isn’t enough to compensate for loss of service as this doesn’t cover subscribers’ bill.  What these customers want is for RIM to pay for their services during the service outage.  Consumers stated that RIM hasn’t compensated them for the loss, though the company is well aware that consumers still had to pay for the service even though they weren’t able to use it.

Yesterday, a class action lawsuit was filed in Quebec Superior Court.  According to Consumer Law Group, the Montreal-based law firm that filed the suit, “on behalf of individuals who have BlackBerry smartphones and who pay for a monthly data plan but were unable to access their email, BlackBerry Messenger service (“BBM”), and/or Internet for the period of October 11 to 14, 2011.”

“The class action involves RIM’s failure to take action to either directly compensate BlackBerry users or to indirectly compensate BlackBerry users by arranging for wireless service providers to refunds their customers and to take full responsibility for these damages,” the firm added.

A similar lawsuit was also filed by Sherman Oaks, California resident Eric Mitchell in California court.  Mitchell claimed that he still had to pay for the service though he wasn’t able to use it the service “in real-time, without delay, reducing and interfering with his productivity and causing him damage and loss of money.”

The plaintiffs in the US are seeking cash compensation for service fees, as well as attorneys’ fees and legal expenses.

When asked to comment on the lawsuits filed, the company stated that “RIM will formally respond to the matter in due course.”  The company has yet to receive the complaint filed against them.

Things are really rough for the Canadian mobile company, as investors aren’t impressed with their ‘peace offering’ either.  And during the BlackBerry DevCon event, RIM’s future sounds promising with talk of their new OS, BBX.  It’s a major overhaul for their devices.  They also talked about the 2.0 update for their PlayBook tablet, with initial plans to release the update next month.  But alas, the update won’t be available until next year.

If RIM wants to get out of the hole they’ve dug, they should do whatever they can to release the much needed update for their PlayBook, and also work on products that can compete in a market dominated by iOS and Android devices.  Also, they need to take care of the angry mob with fair compensation–the customer’s always right, right?