A Montreal law firm is launching a class action lawsuit against Research in Motion Ltd. on behalf of individuals who lost the use of their BlackBerry devices during a service outage earlier this month.

Consumer Law Group Inc. filed a proposal with the Quebec Superior Court to pursue a suit against the company, which saw a major outage across its global network that saw many customers lose access to their data and BlackBerry messenging services between October 11 and 14.

After the multiple-day outage, the company said it would be looking at compensation for affected customers. The company soon offered free apps as a thank you to its customers.

But the suit alleges that the company has not gone far enough to rectify the damage caused. Among the demands are that RIM work with "wireless service providers to refund their customers and to take full responsibility for these damages."

A judge must certify the suit as a legitimate class action before it can proceed.

When asked for comment, a spokesperson for RIM says the company does not typically comment on litigation. The law firm, however, is urging any BlackBerry users who were affected by the outage to contact them.

PlayBook OS delayed

Meanwhile, the company announced Wednesday that the launch of an upgraded operating system for its PlayBook computer tablet will be delayed until February 2012.

The Waterloo, Ont.-based company said the new version of the operating system isn't up to its standards at this point.

"As much as we'd love to have it in your hands today, we've made the difficult decision to wait to launch BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 until we are confident we have fully met the expectations of our developers, enterprise customers and end-users," RIM's senior vice president David Smith said.

RIM had announced earlier this fall the updated operating system would be available in October with features that included the ability for BlackBerry users to automatically access their email, contacts and calendar on the PlayBook — a function it doesn't currently have.

With files from The Canadian Press