You may have been a bit distraught over the recent BlackBerry outage that hit multiple continents. Majority of the carriers affected were promising to compensate their BlackBerry-using customers for the days they spent without access to email, BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) and other services. This compensation is estimated to reach nearly $100 million out of RIM’s 3rd quarter profits, claims Rod Hall of JPMorgan Chase and Co.

“We calculate that each one per cent lost at the top line represents about a penny of lost EPS,” he said. ”Given a large portion of global traffic looks potentially affected we believe that a five-per-cent impact to service-fee revenue is plausible though likely (the) worst case.” RIM did not immediately determine what compensation they were focusing on.

According to Gus Papageorgiou of Scotia Capital, RIM has had to compensate carriers in the past. Although, they were fairly small to be notable. ”This is the worst outage the company has experienced, so we believe there is a decent chance the compensation will be larger,” said Papageorgiou. ”We estimate the worst-case scenario is that RIM refunds a month’s worth of BlackBerry fees to its carrier partners for half of its subscriber base.”

Some analysts expect the compensation to have more of a financial impact than the outage itself. It will be interesting to see how RIM handles this, given the amount of media outcry for them to compensate customers. Would you expect RIM to compensate you, even if it was only $1?

via Montreal Gazette