The company that makes the ubiquitous, addictive BlackBerry smartphones said Tuesday it was still looking into what caused the second widespread service disruption in less than a year.

Research in Motion Ltd. said customers in the United States and Canada “experienced intermittent delays” for about three hours Monday beginning about 3:30 p.m. EST (2030 GMT). Waterloo, Ontario-based RIM said no messages were lost, and voice and text messaging services were unaffected.

“It is too early to determine root cause at that duration, but RIM does have a team addressing that issue in order to define the problem and prevent it in the future,” the company said in a statement.

The BlackBerry service, which lets users check e-mail and access other documents, has become a lifeline for many business executives and is increasingly popular among consumers with smartphones like the BlackBerry Pearl.

Outages have been rare in the BlackBerry’s nine-year history, but when they do hit, subscribers who have become

addicted to the gadgets are quick to unleash their fury.

“I’m mad — it’s decent already,” said a frustrated Stuart Gold, who said he gets 1,000 e-mails a day as director of field marketing for Web analytics company Omniture Inc.

Gold, who worked most of Monday on a laptop while traveling, plans to ask his company to buy him a backup smartphone from a rival like Palm Inc., which makes the Treo, in case BlackBerry service goes on the blink again.

“I don’t know what happened, I don’t care what happened. They need to save their excuses for someone who cares,” Gold said.

RIM has 12 million subscribers worldwide and has deals with scores of wireless carriers to offer the BlackBerry service around the world.

The company did not say how many were affected, though officials with AT&T Inc. and Verizon Wireless said RIM told them the outage hit customers…

Orginal post by Top Tech News