North America Hit By Blackberry Outage

Reuters has reported that those who rely on their BlackBerry phones for life were cut off yesterday afternoon, asthroughout North America the service suffered what RIM, the company that makes the device, called a “critical severity outage.”   The outagehappened in the afternoon, and affected the BlackBerry e-mail service for all carriers, although users could still use the handset to make phone calls.   Around 4 p.m. Eastern time, RIM supportaccount manager sent an e-mail to major clients that stated,   "This is an emergency notification regarding the current BlackBerry Infrastructure outage."   However, there was nocause given for the problem, nor any indication of when service might be resumed. By 7 p.m., though, some users were slowly having their e-mail service resumed.   It’s not the first timeRIM has been hit by a major outage. The last came in April 2007, but with a worldwide base of 12 million customers, the company can’t afford to keep having this kind of problem. As it was itsNasdaq shares fell 1.35 after the news was released.