In a Tuesday night statement, the BlackBerry maker, Research In Motion (RIM), confirmed that, for the second time within a week, the North and South America users of the BlackBerry smartphones were affected by outages in wireless services, including e-mail.

While the telephone and text messaging service remained unaffected by the recent outage, the BlackBerry handset users said on Tuesday that they were experiencing problems with e-mail, Blackberry messenger and other data based applications. Thanks to the outage, most of the 'BlackBerry faithfuls' were at the receiving end of the taunts by iPhone and Android-based phone users!

According to reports, the interruption in the RIM wireless service appeared to be affecting users on almost all leading wireless carriers. Confirming the RIM glitch in a statement, AT&T noted that it was aware of a wireless service problem at the RIM end, due to which some AT&T customers using BlackBerry devices were affected.

Apologizing for the outage, though not offering any timeline for fixing it, the Canada-based RIM said: "BlackBerry customers in the Americas are experiencing delays in message delivery.

Technical teams are actively working to resolve the issue for those impacted. RIM apologizes for any inconvenience experienced by customers."

Earlier too, on December 17, RIM's e-mail delivery on Blackberry phones had been affected by a similar outage, which, as per Bloomberg. com, was resolved within hours.