On the off chance you haven’t heard the news, seen the papers, etc. etc. etc … there is a pretty total failure of the Blackberry infrastructure in North America. This is the downside of the monolithic nature of RIM’s setup, and the outage is the price that you pay for “push” technology – the gratification of instant email to your handheld instead of having your device check for mail every few minutes.
The outage is affecting email and web browsing from Blackberry handhelds, but some people have reported that they can still browse the web if they use their service provider’s browser on the ‘berry instead of the one that comes from RIM. Your mileage may vary.
Oh – and when the system does come back up, expect another disaster when the RIM infrastructure collapses under the load of all the stalled messages. Yikes.