BlackBerry users in North America found themselves without their usual email fix for about three hours yesterday after a major service outage. Carriers across the continent confirmed that their users were being affected. The outage did not affect voice and text-messaging though.
In a statement, RIM confirmed the outage (a data service interruption, according to them). Service was restored around 1830 EST and queued messages began to flow shortly after. RIM has not provided any explanation as to what caused this outage.
RIM suffered a similar outage back in April 2007. Back then, the outage was due to a system upgrade.