Research In Motion notified clients Monday that their BlackBerry email service was out due to a "critical severity outage" affecting "users of the Americas network" and some business clients.  While RIM didn't give specifics regarding the cause of the outage or how many people were left jonesing for their wireless email, service had ground to a halt across the US by late Monday afternoon - though around 5:30 pm Eastern time a few folks started reporting emails slowly trickling into their handsets.

As of now (10:30 pm Eastern on Monday night), there's no official word to be found from RIM regarding the status of the network nor anything on the blogosphere regarding the outage.  Maybe all the BlackBerry addicts are enjoying a night off and, you know, doing something else.

BlackBerry users last suffered a similar fate last April when a service outage temporarily killed service across North America.

Read more at Reuters from here.