A massive system failure that disrupted Research In Motion's BlackBerry e-mail last night for eight million North American users of the mobile messaging device has been resolved, the company said on Wednesday.

A recorded message on the Waterloo, Ont.-based company's customer support line said "service has been restored."

E-mail service to BlackBerrys has been disrupted, but cellphone service to the devices has not been affected.
(Courtesy Research In Motion)

"We are closely monitoring systems to maintain normal service levels," the message said.

Research In Motion had earlier released a statement Wednesday morning  confirming a service interruption occurred overnight.

"[The] root cause is currently under review, but service for most customers was restored overnight and RIM is closely monitoring systems in order to maintain normal service levels," the statement said.

The company has not returned phone calls seeking comments.

Jacqueline Michelis, a spokesperson for Bell Canada — one of several cellular carriers of the hand-held devices — confirmed to CBC News Online the service was starting to return to normal for their customers.

The BlackBerry messaging infrastructure failed around 8 p.m. ET Tuesday, according to a New York media report. The failure didn't affect cellphone service to the devices.

"It seems as if it's basically sort of a total system failure, given that Research In Motion would have redundant systems to deal with a minor outage," Jesse Hirsh, president of Openflows Networks in Toronto, said Wednesday to CBC News.

"We're sort of lucky this had happened overnight," Hirsh said. "If this had happened during normal business hours, there would have been a lot of people yanking their hair out, given their dependence on the devices."

Although some customers were getting e-mail intermittently on Wednesday morning, others were reporting that messages were still not getting through to their portable devices.

Hirsh added that while the system seems to be getting back on line, "they are worried it could go down again given the deluge of e-mail that's queued up to send out … they are trying to trickle the data out by allowing the e-mails to be sent out in batches instead of all at once, but even then there is some concern that the backlog is so great it will overload their systems again."

Previous outages

The last major outages experienced in North America both occurred in June 2006.

The first, on June 17, lasted for between two and four hours and affected customers using U.S. carriers Cingular and T-Mobile. It was attributed to a software upgrade "that did not operate consistent with prior testing," the company said at the time.

A second outage on June 22 was as a result of an unrelated "hardware failure." A RIM statement at the time said a "backup system functioned with lower capacity than expected and the lower capacity then caused latency in message delivery for some customers."

Last week the company reported that revenues in the fourth quarter jumped 66 per cent to $930.4 million US and reported earnings of $187.9 million US.

An additional 1.02 million subscribers to its BlackBerry wireless services added in the quarter puts the company's subscriber base at about eight million.

RIM's shares opened Wednesday at $145.90 on the Toronto Stock Exchange — down $2.92 from last night's close — before reversing course and ending the trading day with a gain. They closed at $151.77, up $2.95.

With files from the Canadian Press