It's the kind of thing that sends CrackBerry addicts into severe withdrawal.

The network that services the ubiquitous Canadian-created Blackberry failed across the U.S. and Canada Monday. Around 3:20pm, many of the handheld devices in North America suddenly stopped working, leaving users unable to connect to their email, send or receive messages, go roaming from one area to another or access the Internet.

In Canada, Rogers Wireless sent messages to their customers advising them of the problem while AT&T did the same thing in the U.S.

The outage lasted about three hours and was back on in the evening. BlackBerry creator,  Waterloo-based Research In Motion, issued a brief statement apologizing for the problem but didn't explain it.

"There is a BlackBerry data service interruption that is causing intermittent service delays for BlackBerry subscribers in North America," RIM advised. "Research In Motion is currently working towards a resolution and will provide an update as soon as possible."

Voice calls and short-message text services weren't affected.