Blackberry Bug Snarls Delivery of E-mails

Don’t panic, Blackberry users. Research In Motion says it’s resolved the particularly ill-timed technical issue that caused crippling e-mail delays throughout North America this morning. Customers, however, may still experience delays for a while as the system works through the backlog of unprocessed e-mails. “The timing couldn’t be worse,” one tech analyst tells Reuters. “In the run-up to the holiday season you never want this kind of black eye.”

To make matters worse, RIM is set to report its third-quarter results after the market close today. It’s not the first time the Blackberry has run into such severe outages, either; customers reported similar issues in February 2008 and April 2007. The company promised an investigation but has never released details. This outage seems to have affected individuals and small businesses, with major corporations largely unscathed. (More BlackBerry stories.)