BlackBerry Outage Frustrates Users Again

"I'm mad it's enough already," said a frustrated Stuart Gold, who said he gets 1,000 e-mails a day as director of field marketing for Web analytics company Omniture Inc. and can't afford the downtime.

Gold, who worked most of Monday on a laptop while traveling, plans to ask his company to buy him a backup smart phone from a rival like Palm Inc., which makes the Treo, in case BlackBerry service goes on the fritz again.

"I don't know what happened, I don't care what happened. They need to save their excuses for someone who cares," Gold said.

It was not immediately clear late Monday what caused the outage the second widespread disruption in less than a year. Some users reported being able to access their service normally.

Research in Motion Ltd., the Waterloo, Ontario-based company that makes the ubiquitous mobile device, said late Monday that customers "experienced intermittent delays" beginning around 3:30 p.m. EST, but data service was restored about three hours later. The company said voice and text messaging services were not affected.

"No messages were lost and message queues began to be cleared after normal service levels were restored,' RIM said, apologizing to customers for the inconvenience.

The company did not say how many customers were affected, though officials with AT&T Inc. and Verizon Wireless said RIM told them the outage hit customers of all wireless carriers.

Bell Canada spokesman Jason Laszlo said the majority of its BlackBerry customers were affected.

RIM has 12 million subscribers worldwide and has deals with scores of wireless carriers to offer the BlackBerry service around the world.