Following major outages in April and September last year it looks like the Blackberry Network has been down again.

There are reports that show the network outage started at 3:20pm EST and is affecting "users of the Americas network".

By about 5:30 p.m. Eastern time -- more than an hour after RIM notified its customers of the problem -- some customers said a few e-mails were trickling through. Others, however, continued to be without service.

When I read the reporting of the outage I did smile at the management of the outage by RIM:

RIM notified its clients of the outage in an e-mail. Company officials were not available for comment.

Maybe sending an email to tell people their email service is down isn't the best option ;)