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A couple of days ago, on Tuesday September 25th, a number of BlackBerry users reported experiencing an outage or e-mail lag, the third such event this year, and the second in September. As with the last one, the effects seemed to be isolated to the BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS) customers. BIS is RIM's mob-e-mail service for individuals and small businesses.

Those affected reported either no data serves working at all or a lag in e-mail delivery. Personally, I experienced an e-mail lag on some e-mail accounts from a few minutes to 30 minutes long. I had no trouble with data services.

A lot of BlackBerry users are getting frustrated with the recent spate of outage and lag issues. While it is doubtful RIM can totally eliminate this from happening, hopefully it can get it enough under control so that it becomes a rarer occurrence than it has been lately.

One bright note: it's been reported that the blackberry.net email addresses did not suffering from the outage problems.

Other Recent Outages
Earlier this month, some RIM customers reported problems retrieving e-mail with their BlackBerry. As with this most recent outage that one only affected BIS users and not the larger companies and organizations that use RIM's BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES).

The only official information RIM offered on the first September outage was that e-mails were only delayed and not lost. Phone calls and text-messaging services weren't affected. They did not give a reason for the problem.

While annoying, both September outages were not anywhere near as bad as the BlackBerry blackout in April.

That BlackBerry outage was caused by a non-critical system upgrade and routine that had not been tested enough. This caused a chain reaction that stopped e-mails from flowing to many businesses, governments, and individuals.

RIM, of course, did not think the software would cause a problem like this, as it was intended to improve the system. It reacted quickly and tried to switch service to its backup system, which had been tested and worked in the past. Unfortunately, this time the backup system did not work, delaying service even more.

Click here for some additional advice on what to do when BlackBerry service goes down.