Research in Motion apologized Monday for the "critical severity outage" that caused problems for millions of Blackberry customers trying to access their email across Canada and the U.S.
RIM, a Waterloo, Ont.-based company, issued a brief email statement confirming a widespread outage, which began at about 3:30 p.m. ET on Monday. A message on RIM's trouble line late Monday said there are no longer any outages.
The company said a data service interruption was causing intermittent delays for North American subscribers, but has not yet said why it happened.
Other features of the hand-held devices such as voice calls and short-message services (SMS) were not affected.
Earlier Monday, Rogers Wireless, Canada's largest BlackBerry provider, posted an automated message on its customer service line saying it was experiencing problems.
This isn't the first time there has been a widespread disruption in RIM's BlackBerry service. Ten months ago the system crashed and the company was criticized for revealing little about the problem.
BlackBerry emails in North America are routed through a single location in southern Ontario.
About 12 million people rely on Blackberrys worldwide.
Telus, another of Canada's three wireless services, confirmed it was also experiencing problems on Monday.
In the U.S., AT&T Inc. and T-Mobile, which have major wireless networks throughout the country, also confirmed they were experiencing problems that began about 3:30 p.m.
