The recent outage across Europe, Middle East, North and South America, has caused rage in consumers as they have lost their trust towards RIM.  Another reason why people have lost their trust towards RIM is that for a very long time, RIM has neither found nor announced the reasons of their outages. This further displays that the business in unreliable and hasn’t been taking initiative to solve their issues.

Therefore, in an attempt to regain their trust, RIM has put together a “SWAT Team” to discover the reasons of such lengthy outages that occurred internationally (details found in article here). This can be seen through statistics of RIM’s shares as it has decreased at least 3.5%. These outages have led people to question their loyalty with RIM because it has impacted the people who’ve relied on their Blackberry for work and communication. The question every Blackberry smartphone user is asking is, “Should I switch to Apple’s iPhone?” The question was also raised because during their time of outage, Apple’s iPhone 4S launched and, therefore, has probably drawn some of RIM’s disgruntled users.

The outages have impacted RIM as a whole as more people realize the brand image it portrays—reliable and innovative– is false and has jeopardized their brand position. RIM now has to restructure their business strategy to regain their customer base.