Last week, Research in Motion suffered what’s being called the worst service outage in company history. Affecting users around the world, the service interruption lasted three days. Not long after normal service resumed, unhappy customers started demanding compensation. Today, RIM announced that it will be compensating users. However, the company is not doling out cash refunds to the affected. Instead, users who experienced problems last week will be getting free apps.

The company announced today that a selection of premium apps worth a total value of more than US $100 will be offered to subscribers as an expression of appreciation for their patience during the service outages. The apps will be made available to customers over the coming weeks on BlackBerry App World and will continue to be available until December 31, 2011.

Aside from the special package of apps, enterprise customers will also be offered one month of free technical support and current customers will be offered a complimentary one month extension of their existing technical support. If you don’t have a tech support contract already, RIM is giving you a one month trial of RIM’s BlackBerry Technical Support Services – Enhanced Support, free of charge.

“We truly appreciate and value our relationship with our customers,” said said RIM Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis. “We’ve worked hard to earn their trust over the past 12 years, and we’re committed to providing the high standard of reliability they expect, today and in the future.”

“We are grateful to our loyal BlackBerry customers for their patience,” he added. “We have apologized to our customers and we will work tirelessly to restore their confidence. We are taking immediate and aggressive steps to help prevent something like this from happening again.”

For additional details about the free tech support program and information about how to register will be available at www.blackberry.com/enterpriseoffer.

The apps included in the special compensation package are:

• SIMS 3 – Electronic Arts
• Bejeweled – Electronic Arts
• N.O.V.A. – Gameloft
• Texas Hold’em Poker 2 – Gameloft
• Bubble Bash 2 – Gameloft
• Photo Editor Ultimate – Ice Cold Apps
• DriveSafe.ly Pro – iSpeech.org
• iSpeech Translator Pro – iSpeech.org
• Drive Safe.ly Enterprise – iSpeech.org
• Nobex Radio™ Premium – Nobex
• Shazam Encore – Shazam
• Vlingo Plus: Virtual Assistant – Vlingo

SOURCE via RIM