E-mail service of Research In Motion's BlackBerry smartphones experienced a "critical severity outage" on Monday, the company told clients in an e-mail.
"This is an emergency notification regarding the current BlackBerry Infrastructure outage," RIM support account manager Bryan Simpson said in an e-mail. The message said the outage affected enterprise clients and "users of the Americas network."
RIM was not immediately available for comment and its e-mail gave no estimate on when service may be restored or how many individuals could be affected.
Last April, a massive outage crashed BlackBerry service across North America, leaving thousands of users without access to wireless e-mail.
Co-CEO Jim Balsillie said at the time that such incidents were "very rare" and the Waterloo, Ontario-based company was taking steps to prevent such an outage from happening again.
Executives, politicians, lawyers, and other professionals rely on the BlackBerry for its ability to send secure e-mails.
RIM is also adding more retail customers to its subscriber base, which late last year reached about 12 million people worldwide.
RIM shares fell to $93.14 in after-hours electronic trade, from their regular-session close of $94.47 on the Nasdaq market.
©2007 CNET Networks, Inc. All rights reserved. CNET , CNET.com , and the CNET logo are registered trademarks of CNET Networks, Inc. Used by permission.
