Blackberry email service down

BlackBerry email service went down Monday afternoon, according to Research in Motion, maker of the smartphone.

In a service notification sent to CNN, RIM said BlackBerry subscribers “may be unable to send or receive messages and may also be unable to “register their device, roam in another location, or use other services such as Internet browsing.”

The service outage was causing intermittent delays for subscribers in North America, RIM said in a statement late Monday. The company also said that voice and SMS services were not affected.

Stephanie Walsh, a spokeswoman for Sprint Nextel, said the outage began at 3:20 ET and affected all carriers, but not necessarily all BlackBerry users. Walsh said RIM informed Sprint the outage was resolved and that a backlog of emails would be coming soon.

Mark Siegel, a spokesman for AT&T, another BlackBerry carrier, said his company was informed at 3:30 ET about the outage.

According to Verizon spokesman, Tom Pica, a RIM email server had gone down, which was the source of the problem. “Service has been restored,” said Pica, “it will just take a little while [for Verizon's system] to catch up.”

Voice service on the Verizon network was not affected, he said.

“A couple of hours is not a huge deal,” said Tom Kelly, a spokesman for JPMorgan Chase. “It’s probably a nuisance. Longer will be a problem. It’s amazing how we rely on them.”

JPMorgan Chase’s employees use the BlackBerry under multiple carriers, including AT&T and T-Mobile, he said.

RIM’s BlackBerry network had about 12 million subscribers as of December 20th, when it reported its third quarter earnings.

RIM experienced major network outages in April and September 2007.

Sprint, Verizon and AT&T said the outage was not due to a malfunction within their networks.

RIM apologized to customers for the service interruptions and said it is “currently working towards a resolution and will provide an update as soon as possible.”