I mean, yes it was only a couple of days and yes, BlackBerry users were still able to make phone calls and send smses (and evidently find a way to use Facebook and Twittter. Seriously, Facebook was like a BlackBerry forum for three days) but the fact is that there is still a principle involved.
If you are going to offer a service that people are going to come to rely on then you have to be able to keep that service running, or at the very least refund customers for the time the service was unavailable (and yes, it may only be R60 per month but it could just as easily be R600 per month), because after all, why should you pay for something you aren't getting?
(Funnily enough South African service providers (so far Vodacom, Cell C and Virgin Mobile) have announced that they'll compensate their customers for the time BlackBerry was dealing with its issues - and they didn't even have anything to do with it!)
Millions of people have been affected by the disruption in the BBM service - now that's a heck of a lot of people. Shouldn't RIM (the service provider) have invested in a little redundancy to avoid a failure like this?
When you're dealing with millions of people you can't afford to go offline for three days, people are going to get riled up, it's in their nature, and the end result is going to be a lot of customers who feel hard done by.
How many times has Facebook been offline that you can remember? That's because they realise that if they can't promise their users a consistent service their users will quite likely find someone else who will.
So I hope RIM takes a valuable lesson from this, before they alienate their customers any further.