Thousands of BlackBerry users in Bermuda had their systems blacked out after server problems interrupted service in much of the Western Hemisphere.

On Tuesday afternoon and for much of yesterday, BlackBerry users were not able to access their applications. Last Thursday a similar problem affected the smartphones.

Last night Wayne Caines, CEO of Digicel Bermuda, a leading provider of BlackBerry services in Bermuda, said: "A very large portion of our customer base use BlackBerries and this outage has affected the entire base.

"Right now we know that there is still a small portion of our customers who are experiencing problems related to the outage.

"We apologise and are working diligently to restore service to those customers that are still affected. We will be updating them with any information that we have."

The BlackBerry is one of the most popular smartphones in the world and is widely used by corporations and large companies as well as consumers as a communication tool. BlackBerries are also extremely popular in Bermuda, holding a considerable share of the phone market.

While this outage did not affect normal calling and texting it did affect BlackBerry data services including e-mail.

Unaware that there were service problems with RIM, many believed it was their individual phones that were malfunctioning.

"I thought it was just my cell having problems last night," said Tracy Lambert on The Royal Gazette's Facebook page.

Others were left without an explanation and blamed their service providers. "I had problems all yesterday afternoon," said Rocelle Hutchings in an e-mail. "And this morning there is internet but I can't open Facebook comments etc."

Shellshock Jones wrote on our Facebook page: "It is not working now. Internet, BBM or e-mail. They need to get this fixed asap."

Angela G. Robinson wrote: "I didn't seem to have a problem, but need to turn the crackberry off anyway. I'm on vacation!"

Yesterday, the Canadian company that owns BlackBerry, Research in Motion (RIM), said it had resolved last Thursday's problems but would not divulge reasons for the outage.

A statement released blamed Tuesday's outages on a flaw in the popular BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) programme. BBM is a free chat service available for BlackBerry users.

RIM apologised to its customers in the statement and has pledged to monitor their network to prevent this from happening again.

But it was not all bad news as at least one Bermudian welcomed a break. Greg Hopkins wrote on The Royal Gazette Facebook page: "Mine has stopped working. Thank God for that."