Blue Crab Boulevard

It appears that there is a major disruption in the Blackberry service that is hitting across all wireless carriers. The Wireless services say the problem is not theirs, but with Blackberry - but nobody at the company is answering the media inquiries about the problem.

 NEW YORK - A major service outage afflicted users of the popular, addictive BlackBerry smart phones across the United States and Canada on Monday, wireless carriers said.

Officials with AT&T Inc. and Verizon Wireless said BlackBerry maker Research in Motion Ltd. told them customers of all wireless carriers were affected.

It was not immediately clear how many BlackBerry subscribers had problems, as some users reported being able to access their service normally Monday afternoon.

The BlackBerry service, which lets users check e-mail and access other data services on their handheld devices, has become a lifeline for many business executives and is increasingly popular among consumers with models like the BlackBerry Pearl.

There was no word what caused the outage or when service would be restored.

RIM officials did not return phone calls.

My sister - who is a huge technophobe - became, ironically, a Crackberry fiend a few years back. I should call her and see how she's weathering the forced cold turkey. Nah, probably best not to push her buttons when she can't retaliate.