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It looks like some RIM customers experienced data problems with their BlackBerrys today. Specifically, these users have received the dreaded “data connection refused" error.

According to Information I’ve received, the outage was mostly confined to customers of AT&T and in Northeast US. BlackBerry problems have also been reported in places like Michigan and even Alaska.

I contacted a friend of mine, an AT&T BlackBerry user that lives in Northeast, who confirmed the outage: problems with data service (e.g. e-mail, Web surfing), but not with voice service.

The outage was also confirmed by at least one person who manages both AT&T and T-Mobile BlackBerrys. He said the T-Mobile people were not having any problems.

So this time round it looks like the problem is with the service provider and not RIM. Not much comfort to AT&T customers, I know. At least it doesn’t appear to be another black eye on RIM’s resume.

As for me, I checked my T-Mobile BlackBerry regularly today, and had no problems. My data and e-mail was working fine all day. I did not receive any reports of anyone not on AT&T experiencing problems so far.

A little over a week ago, on Tuesday September 25th, a number of BlackBerry users reported experiencing an outage or e-mail lag. This was the second such event in September. For those keeping count, yesterday’s event makes it four BlackBerry blackouts for 2007 so far.