A major outage hit BlackBerry users in North America on Monday afternoon, cutting off wireless e-mail for everyone. The problem, which BlackBerry owner Research In Motion described as a "critical severity outage" affecting users in the Americas, once again raised concerns about the stability of the e-mail service 10 months after a widespread crash last April.
RIM notified its clients of the outage in an e-mail. The total downtime was about 3 hours.
UPDATE: An outage which hit the BlackBerry mobile e-email service on Monday may have been caused by an upgrade to the systems of owner Research In Motion, its co-chief executive Jim Balsillie said on Tuesday.