Research In Motion's Blackberry e-mail service suffered a significant outage for the second time in as many weeks.

"Some Blackberry customers in the Americas are currently experiencing delays in message delivery," RIM said in a statement.

"Our technical teams are actively working to resolve this issue for those impacted. We apologize for any inconvenience," RIM said.

The problem appeared to arise early Wednesday, as users flooded Twitter and other social networking sites with posts in which they complained their Blackberry service had slowed to a crawl or was down altogether.

The disruption comes about a week after RIM was hit with a massive outage that curtailed Blackberry service throughout much of North America.

That outage hit Blackberry services offered by numerous carriers, including Sprint Nextel, AT&T, Verizon Wireless, and Canada's Rogers. The trouble appeared to be limited to RIM's consumer-oriented Internet service, and did not affect corporate users who send messages through a BlackBerry Enterprise Server.

Some users on a Blackberry forum dubbed "Crackberry" have been less than impressed with RIM's service of late.

"It feels like almost a monthly occurrence that I see BIS outages reported," wrote forum member DrewDT. "Isn't e-mail reliability one of the cornerstone's of BlackBerry's reputation and success?" wrote the member.

Blackberry CEO Jim Balsille has taken heat lately from some customers and investors, who charge that in the past year he spent too much time trying to purchase the National Hockey League's Phoenix Coyotes, instead of focusing on RIM's products and services.

RIM shares were off sharply Tuesday, down 3.61% to $71.21 on the Toronto Stock Exchange.

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