Major disruption hits BlackBerry service

Toronto: A "critical" outage hit BlackBerry users in North America on Monday, cutting off wireless email for users.

The latest outage raised concerns about the stability and reliability of the service 10 months after a widespread crash last April.

Carmi Levy, senior vice-president of strategic consulting at AR Communications, said reliability is a serious concern for BlackBerry owner Research in Motion (RIM).

"It's a big issue and it's a growing issue," Levy said, adding that huge outages could prove to be "a major Achilles' heel" for RIM.

RIM notified its clients of the outage in an e-mail, but gave no details on the cause, when service might be restored or how many people could be affected.

The last big outage in April 2007 provoked an angry backlash from more compulsive users, who have dubbed the device "CrackBerry" due to its drug-like addictiveness.

RIM's worldwide subscriber base reached about 12 million people by late last year, mainly executives, politicians, lawyers and other professionals.