"It is only fitting that we do this as a gesture of appreciation for their patience"

BlackBerry customers are to get some consolation from two other cellphone companies after some BlackBerry services crashed this week.

Vodacom said on Friday it would give its BlackBerry customers 20 free Vodacom to Vodacom calls, after the three days of service disruptions and outages this week. They would also get 20 free SMS messages.

“It is only fitting that we do this as a gesture of appreciation for their patience,” said Portia Maurice, Vodacom’s chief officer for corporate affairs.

Cell C said it would give its customers R10 off the cost of their BlackBerry Internet/Enterprise Service for the month of October. It would also throw in 10 free SMS messages for the time they could not use BlackBerry Messenger.

BlackBerry’s messenger and internet services were down on Monday, part of Tuesday, and on Wednesday, 'due to a core switch failure'.