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The thumbs mob-e-mail addicts across North America ached with the need to send and receive e-mail messages today, as Research In Motion’s (RIM) experienced a massive, continent-wide outage of its market-leading BlackBerry service.

RIM support account manager Bryan Simpson notified customers through an e-mail, calling today’s widespread BlackBerry disruption a “critical severity outage."

The BlackBerry blackout isn't just widespread geographically. Unlike some recent outages, it appears this one doesn’t discriminate between individuals and enterprises, as both types of BlacKBerry users have reportedly been affected.

There’s nothing your mobile operators can do for you either, as the disruption is taking place on RIM’s end and not at the carrier level. RIM notified AT&T, North America’s largest wireless carrier, of the problem at 3:30pm eastern time this afternoon.

RIM has more customers than ever, surpassing 12 million subscribers late last year. But with the good comes the bad. So while that’s great for the mob-e-mail leader’s bottom line, it means more people than ever are negatively affected when an outage like the one today occurs.

April 2007 was the last time BlackBerry customers experienced such a major disruption in service. At the time, co-CEO of RIM Jim Balsillie indicated an outage at that level would not happen again and that the disruption itself, which happened during a software upgrade due to insufficient testing, was entirely available.

Oh well.

BlackBerry users experienced another round, but less severe, series outages last fall.

There’s been no word as to what caused today’s problems or if they’ve been fully resolved.

Meanwhile, RIM's stock took a hit in after-hours trading.