Credit: Russel A. Daniels / Associated Press

BlackBerry users were left without e-mail on their handsets for more than nine hours late Tuesday -- the second time the service has been interrupted in a week -- leading some analysts to question whether customers might begin canceling.

During the interruption, message delivery was delayed or intermittent in North and South America. But phone and text services were unaffected.

The root cause for why the popular wireless e-mail service went under is “currently under review,” according to a statement by Research in Motion, the Canadian company that makes the BlackBerry. The company, known as RIM, believes the issue stemmed from a flaw in two recently released versions of BlackBerry Messenger.

“RIM has taken corrective action to restore service,” the company said. “RIM has also provided a new version of BlackBerry Messenger (version 5.0.0.57) and is encouraging anyone who downloaded or upgraded BlackBerry Messenger since December 14th to upgrade to this latest version which resolves the issue. “

The company said it is continuing to monitor its systems to maintain normal service levels, and apologized to its customers.

Although RIM promised to keep a close eye on things, it didn't stop BlackBerry users from blasting the company on social networking sites like Twitter.

“Oh @blackberry how I loathe thee... My internet is still not working so... BOO!” read one tweet. Another suggested a change of service altogether: “I might just have to switch from a blackberry to iphone. I hate to say it.”

This is heresy to many BlackBerry users, said Jeff Kagan, a telecommunications analyst. RIM has developed a “cult-like following” with its customers. After all, many customers refer to their phones as CrackBerrys.

“I don't see customers canceling service yet, but if outages continue that may start to happen,” Kagan said. “Every year or two RIM suffers an outage. So far it hasn’t hurt them too bad. But each time the company gets a black eye, but it has a chance to heal before the next black eye."

RIM experienced major outages in April 2007 and February 2008. And just last Thursday, BlackBerry customers in North America experienced e-mail delays.

“This is the second outage in a few weeks,” Kagan said. “Customers listened to reports of the first and put a notch in their mind. Now there is a second outage and customers put another notch in the mind and pay more attention.”

-- W.J. Hennigan