Good Morning Silicon Valley

For a while there, it looked like we were in for a really edgy morning across the business world after BlackBerry users, shaking and sweating, spent the night trying to make a connection. A system failure at Research in Motion that started about 8 p.m. EDT Tuesday left millions of BlackBerry customers across North America cut off or with intermittent service from their e-mail lifeline. According to a RIM statement this morning, “Root cause is currently under review, but service for most customers was restored overnight and RIM is closely monitoring systems in order to maintain normal service levels.” And while some users did indeed see the flow resume, a massive mail backup (probably filled with messages like “Test, test. Did you get this?”) was apparently keeping service spotty for many.

And for a company in the business of instant communication, RIM didn’t exactly cover itself in glory. It was 12 hours into the outage before RIM added an acknowledgment of the problem (but no prognosis) to its automated telephone service line, and there’s still no mention of it on the Web site.