Virgin Mobile to refund BlackBerry users

Virgin Mobile South Africa has announced that its subscribers will receive a refund for the time the BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS) was interrupted.

Virgin Mobile CEO, Steve Bailey said the refund will take the form of a R50 airtime credit to be applied to all affected customers with immediate effect.

“Rather than a pro rata credit applied to the bill of affected customers next month, we’ve decided a higher value immediate airtime credit would be more useful.”

“We trust our customers will approve of our decision and again wish to apologise for any inconvenience caused by the downtime of the BlackBerry Internet Service,” he said in a statement.

According to information released by Research In Motion (RIM), the messaging and browsing delays experienced by BlackBerry users around the globe were caused by a core switch failure within RIM’s infrastructure and the resulting backlog of messages in the system.

“We apologise to our BlackBerry customers, on behalf of Research In Motion, for the inconvenience caused,”  Bailey said at the time.

“Fortunately for Virgin Mobile subscribers, with the 1000 free SMSs they get every month they have been able to continue chatting anyway, so we hope that the loss of the BlackBerry Internet Service has not affected them too severely.”

For further information on the BlackBerry service interruption, please visit http://uk.blackberry.com/serviceupdate/

Staff Writer