NEW YORK - A system outage blocked BlackBerry e-mail service on Wednesday, frustrating users of the addictive mobile devices.
It wasn't immediately clear how widespread the problems were, or whether they affected all cellular carriers that offer BlackBerry service.
Research in Motion Ltd., the Canadian company that makes the devices and runs the e-mail service, did not immediately respond to requests for information.
One BlackBerry user who subscribes to the service through T-Mobile USA was told by a customer service representative for that company that the outage was "a RIM issue and not a T-Mobile issue."
"The time of resolution is not known to us right now," the representative said.
The outage also was mentioned Wednesday morning by the chief financial officer of JPMorgan Chase & Co., Michael J. Cavanaugh, during a conference call discussing the financial company's quarterly earnings.
Last week, RIM reported that it added about 1 million BlackBerry subscriber accounts during the first three months of 2007, bringing its total subscriber base to 8 million.
Shares of RIM fell 2 percent in premarket trading, falling $2.77 to $128.50.
