After a four-day service outage experienced by BlackBerry customers across five continents that started on Oct. 10, public sympathy for RIM’s smartphone seems to have decreased, according to a study by research firm Yougov.

The fallouts, which started in the form of messaging and browsing delays, were caused by a core switch failure within Research in Motion’s infrastructure.

Europe, the Middle East and Africa were affected by the problems first, followed by India, Latin America, Canada and the United States.

Robin Bienfait, chief information officer of Research in Motion Ltd, apologized on RIM’s Web site for the service problems on Oct. 12 by stating; “You’ve depended on us for reliable, real-time communications, and right now we’re letting you down.”

On the same day, statements were published warning BlackBerry customers about a hoax message which had circulated among certain users and also informed them about a significant increase in service levels.

Finally, on Oct. 13 RIM solved the problems and the smartphones began to operate normally again.

Yougov’s study shows that BlackBerry’s brand perception score fell drastically from +11 points before the outages began to -26 when they were fixed.

By Oct. 14 the score reached a low-level of -52. RIM’s perception was also affected, but to a lesser extent with a decrease from 0-12 within the same time period.

Rehl Balg, an 18-year-old MC student has been a satisfied BlackBerry customer for one year.

Although she did not face any problems with her phone, she knows a few people who were very upset about problems with their BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) and the Twitter application.

“If people hear negative things about it, they are not going to want to buy it,” said Balg.

Coincidentally, the interruptions started four days before Apple launched its iPhone 4.

RIM’s smartphone market share dropped from 3.2 percent in the second quarter of 2010 to 3.0 percent in the second quarter of 2011, according to Gartner Research.

Apple however, faced an increase from 2.4 percent to 4.6 percent.

Yougovs study proves the outages can potentially harm RIM’s BlackBerry in the long run, as customers might switch to an iPhone after dealing with service problems.

MC student Lindsay Johnson, a 19-year-old psychology major, had problems with sending messages and emails through her BlackBerry.

Johnson thought about switching to an iPhone, and said if she had the money to afford it, she would have bought one.

“When you see something bad in front of you and then you see something better you could have, why wouldn’t you switch? “said Johnson.

Josh Ackerman, a salesman at T-Mobile in Simi Valley, stated that only a few people came in the store to complain about the outages and delays.

“We didn’t have too many problems in this area, so the BlackBerry customers we have are fine,” Ackerman said. “The more problems BlackBerry has with their system, the more it’s gonna make people buy an iPhone. “

Even though RIM solved its service problems within a few days, the outages have had a negative impact on BlackBerry customers.

The question remains whether BlackBerry will earn back their customers’ trust by only giving away a selection of free premium applications, which seems to be their current attempt at a damage control strategy.

Public perception of Blackberry has been steadily decreasing since the outages. ( Yugov)

Research in Motion has seen a decline in market shares over the past year. ( Gartner)