BlackBerry users this morning woke up to find that their precious push e-mail service was down. Push e-mail junkies across the entire Western Hemisphere were without their fix. Will this outage be the break BlackBerry's competitors have been looking for?Obviously, this is a huge deal. While Research In Motion encouraged users to make backups, that's just not enough in this era of instant competition. This outage has impacted thousands of businesses in a major way. Push e-mail for many managers and employees is mission critical, and when a mission-critical app goes down, business suffers and IT managers get pressure to look at new solutions.

RIM has been adding new subscribers to its BlackBerry service at a faster-than-normal rate in recent months. This rapid expansion may have contributed to the crash. RIM had better move fast to take care of this and to make sure it doesn't happen again. If BlackBerry has any competitive advantage against the likes of Nokia, et al, it's the service's sterling reputation as a bulletproof system that just works. Outages like this tarnish the BlackBerry brand and open new opportunities for RIM's competition.

If I were Nokia, Motorola, or Microsoft, I'd be marketing the heck out of this BlackBerry outage. Now, can any of RIM's competitors actually capitalize on this?