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Here we go again. Some people have reported problems (see here and here) sending and receiving e-mail with their BlackBerry today.

This is the second disruption in BlackBerry service in less than a month. A few weeks ago, a routine upgrade to the BlackBerry infrastructure to (ironically) increase capacity caused the popular e-mail service to go down for over three hours across North America.

Today's outage and slowdown doesn't seem to be as critical as the one from early February. It apparently started early this morning, mostly affecting BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS) customers, which includes individuals and small businesses.

According to a posting at the DataOutages.com newsgroup, an AT&T representative had this to say about the problem:

A National Blackberry outage may affect email delivery for some newly provisioned Blackberry users; up to 50% of these customers may be affected. RIM and our Data Services team are currently troubleshooting.

In addition to AT&T, Rogers and Telus in Canada have confrimed the outage with their customers, making today's disruption - like the last one - a continent-wide affair.

The outage and slow down grew worse throughout they day today, it seems, eventually affecting almost all rather than just half of BIS users, as the AT&T representative said earlier in the day.

As of now, it appears Research In Motion’s (RIM) BlackBerry mob-e-mail problems have been brought under control. Nonetheless, although BIS is up and running, one member of the newsgroup reports e-mail still coming in slowly. According to an AT&T representative he spoke to, the continued delay is because of the large queue of messages that built up because during the disruption.

Update: RIM's released a statement regarding yesterday's event:

RIM did perform regularly scheduled maintenance on BlackBerry Internet Service that took longer than originally expected, and some BlackBerry Internet Service customers may have experienced slower delivery of e-mail earlier today. The majority of customers would not have seen any impact.

How many more of these outages have to happen before they leave a permanent stain on RIM's reputation for excellent reliability?

The worst BlackBerry blackout occurred last April, when 8-million users lost service for 14 hours. As with the one from earlier this month, it was caused by an upgrade to RIM's infrastructure, which requires all messages go through its central servers on the way to and from a BlackBerry. At the time, RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie indicated an outage at that level would not happen again.

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

Today, more than 12.5 million users rely on RIM and their BlackBerry to send and receive e-mail while on the move.