RIM, the company that operates the BlackBerry service, said "the incident was triggered by the introduction of a new, noncritical system routine that was designed to provide better optimization of the system's cache."

But RIM discovered that "pretesting of the system routine proved to be insufficient" when a compounding series of "interaction errors" were triggered between the database and the cache. The company's attempts to correct the problems were unsuccessful, and technicians moved to the backup system.

Although it had been "repeatedly and successfully tested previously," the company reported, the backup system did not "fully perform to RIM's expectations in this situation and therefore caused further delay in restoring service and processing the resulting message queue."

RIM apologized to its customers for any inconvenience, and said the cause was not related to security, capacity, or hardware.

'A Little Foolish'

The whole episode "makes them look a little foolish," said Todd Kort, an analyst with industry research firm Gartner. "Not only did their upgrade not work, but their backup didn't back up."

He said that the positive news is that RIM has said it wasn't a capacity issue, and that "they've fixed the immediate problem, which is to get back to where they were."

But the way it was handled was "poor," he noted. "They didn't provide much information on their Web site when it was occurring, and no senior executives have come forward to offer an explanation."

He said that if RIM had handled it better and given the company "a human face," people would be more forgiving when it happens again. "It will happen again," he said, and BlackBerry owners will remember how RIM dealt with it before.

CrackBerry Addicts

The e-mail outage hit Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, and impacted nearly all of the eight million BlackBerry owners. It affected all e-mail on BlackBerrys, regardless of which cellular company was used for service. There are reports that e-mail service was impacted as early as 8 p.m. Tuesday night, and all service was restored by Wednesday.

Phone service on the popular wireless devices was not affected.

BlackBerry owners are known to be heavily reliant on their portable devices for their access to e-mail when they are away from their notebook or desktop PCs. In fact, the dependence can be so strong that the devices have acquired the well-known nickname of "CrackBerry." The word was chosen as New Word of the Year for 2006 by Webster's Dictionary.

"We all lost our data when we were in the House of Commons last night," a member of the Canadian Parliament wrote in his blog. "The sound of BlackBerrys being thrown against the desk was deafening for a while." Because RIM is a Canadian company, the sounds might have been particularly loud.