BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion is offering enterprise customers a free month of technical support by way of an apology for last week’s service outages.

Enterprise customers "will be offered a complimentary one month extension of their existing technical support contract, and customers who do not currently have a technical support contract will be offered a one month trial … free of charge," the company said in a statement.

The outages, which originally affected customers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, but later spread to the US and Asia, were triggered by a network switch failure, followed by a malfunction in the failover system that is supposed to move traffic onto a redundant switch when this occurs. That caused a backlog of messages that RIM was unable to process for many days.

RIM’s consumer customers have been offered $100-worth of free apps from a selected list.

“We are grateful to our loyal BlackBerry customers for their patience,” said RIM’s co-CEO Mike Lazaridis. “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.”

Last week, Ovum analyst Nick Dillon told Information Age that the outages are likely to an impact on the company’s already-troubled business. "I would imagine there will be some customers who, as a result of these events, might think more carefully about buying BlackBerrys."