BlackBerry users across the United States and Canada suffered through a major service outage yesterday, the second disruption in less than a year. Research In Motion (RIM) has not identified the cause of the outage, but said that customers began experiencing "intermittent delays" starting about 3:30 p.m. EST; data service was restored roughly three hours later. Voice and text services were not affected.

In an apology to customers, RIM said that, "no messages were lost" and that the company "continues to focus on providing industry-leading reliability in its products and services and apologizes to customers for any inconvenience."

Although there is no official report of how many users were affected by the outage, nearly all major U.S. and Canadian carriers reported customer complaints. RIM has 12 million subscribers worldwide.

The most recent major BlackBerry service outage was last April; the previous one was nearly two years before that.