Thanks to both Duffman56 and sax_man424 for their news submissions.
Last night in North America BlackBerry service was interrupted. It has recently been restored to most customers, according to Research In Motion Limited. The company said in a statement that it is reviewing the root cause of the disruption, which began yesterday night, and is "closely monitoring systems to maintain normal service levels." It should be noted that the phone service wasn"t affected and that Europe avoided the problem completely.
RIM has about 8 million subscribers who use various models of its ubiquitous BlackBerry. In the past, Outages have been very rare for the Waterloo, Ontario-based company and service is typically very stable. The only real impact such a short outage may have is on investors and on the stock market. Other than that, RIM will probably continue to function as always. RIM added 1.02 million BlackBerry subscribers in the fourth quarter alone, and the torrid pace of growth isn"t expected to slow any time soon.