RIM may suffer shrinkage in its vulnerable customer base as many have started looking for alternatives to BlackBerry after the recent outage that left millions of users without access to messaging and emailing services.

London-based venture capitalist Frederic Court, who has long been using BlackBerry for emailing, said that he was going to ditch BlackBerry in favor of the iPhone.

Explaining his decision, Court said, "I'm going to drop the BlackBerry and focus on the iPhone - it will save a bit of money and probably be more efficient."

Richard Levick, a Washington-based businessman, has already relaxed his company's the BlackBerry-only policy to allow employees to switch over to other phones.

He said that thousands of companies would instruct their IT directors to find alternatives to BlackBerry, accusing RIM of having no crisis plan. He also added that RIM didn't communicate with their customers.

The BlackBerry outage, which started early morning this week, harassed users in Europe, Brazil, Chile, Africa, Argentina, Middle East, and India for more than three days.