BlackBerry Blackout Lasts 12 Hours

Five million BlackBerry scrollers in the U.S. and Asia were stymied for 12 hours over Tuesday night and yesterday morning while Research in Motion frantically fixed a service outage. Early-riser Wall Streeters working on deals with London were particularly annoyed by the downtime. Experts surmise the blackout was a side effect of rapid expansion.

Wireless email addicts described a sort of withdrawal: "I was running around my hotel like a freak," one business traveler said. Others were more directly peeved at the Canadian R.I.M. "It's an unfortunate black eye for the company," a stockbroker told the Guardian. The company's shares dropped 2% on Nasdaq. (More Research In Motion stories.)