Blackberry users on all mobile carriers in North and South America experienced e-mail and Internet outages for about eight hours late on Tuesday. This follows a shorter outage on December 17th that only affected e-mail services.

An RIM outage is problematic because all Blackberry devices use their data services regardless of carrier.

Are you a Blackberry user? How did you survive? Me, I wasn’t even aware until after midnight.

BlackBerry users hit by eight-hour outage [CNN]