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CNN reports that millions of Blackberry customers in North America lost their data services late Tuesday. Phone calls were unaffected, and data services were restored a few hours later.

Verizon claimed that their Blackberry customers were not affected. BlackberryCool believed the outage was caused by a failure in RIM’s server farm, which provides data services to almost every Blackberry customer. Reuters Canada noted that Blackberry services in Europe were not affected.

Blackberrys receive email through a server-based push service hosted by RIM. Companies can purchase and install Blackberry enterprise server softtware that will work with existing email and IM solutions. Small business and individual customers can purchase these services through the mobile carrier, or install a desktop application to push email from Outlook to their Blackberry. However, all of this software still depends on RIM’s server farm to perform the push. The RIM servers also handle web page requests from blackberry devices, reformatting the pages as needed so that they will fit on the small screen.

According to FCC documents filed by RIM, the developer of the Blackberry service and devices, almost 8 million devices are in use worldwide. The US Congress purchased thousands of Canadian-made Blackberry devices after the 9-11 attacks to give senators, representatives and their staffs an integrated mobile communications solution. Blackberry was one of the few mobile services that worked in the New York City area after dozens of cell antennas were destroyed when the Twin Towers fell.