Code Black: Portable Email Network Crashes Again

Research in Motion, maker of the ubiquitous BlackBerry handheld device, reported a "critical severity" outage in its email service on Monday.

"This is an emergency notification regarding the current BlackBerry Infrastructure outage," R.I.M. support account manager Bryan Simpson said in an e-mail to Reuters.

This is not the first time the company has had a major BlackBerry service crash. In April 2007, BlackBerry email service across North America failed, leaving thousands of users unable to send and receive emails.

Monday's outage appeared to be much worse. Reporting on CNBC, Silicon Valley bureau chief Jim Goldman said 12 million BlackBerry devices were affected.

At the time of last year's crash, BlackBerry boss Jim Balsillie said that such outages were "very rare" and pledged that the company would prevent such a service failure from happening again.

Unfortunately for Balsillie and R.I.M., the company appears to have been unable to do so.

Users reported BlackBerry service failing at about 3 p.m. EST.

AT&T told the business news channel that the disruption, which it first learned about at 3:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, affected all wireless carriers.

by Sam Gustin