Airtel Kenya Waives Charges to its BlackBerry Users after Global Outage

Airtel has announced that it will offer its BlackBerry customers a 3 day service waiver following a global outage attributed to the service provider Research in Motion.

Research in Motion has now fully restored data services to its BlackBerry devices. The outage which was caused by a hardware error halted messaging and Web browsing across many parts of the world, disrupting services for 3 days. Initial disruptions were recorded in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and India early in the week and later spread to North America.

Mr. Shivan Bhargava, Airtel Kenya’s Chief Operating Officer stated Airtel’s concern about the inconvenience “caused to all our BlackBerry users earlier this week and we would like to compensate both our pre paid and post paid customers for the inconvenience as best we can. For our pre paid customers, we will extend the subscription of the services for the month of October by three days. We are communicating this to our inconvenienced customers through sms.”

For our Post Paid customers, who are customers paying their bills at the end of every month, AIrtel 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 Airtel’s post paid BlackBerry users for the month of October.

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.