RIM’s popular BlackBerry push-email service is experiencing its third outage in nine months, just over a week since the last interruption prevented eight million US users from accessing their email via their smartphones.  Beginning at 3am this morning, apparently around 80-percent of all BlackBerry devices in the continental US have been affected by the issue, with the fault spanning networks and models.

Some users are finding their service is returning, but there is as yet no official word from RIM as to the cause of the problem - which last time was blamed on “an untested storage feature” that took them offline for over three hours - nor the timescale within which subscribers can expect things to be fixed. 

After the second outage, many analysts predicted that IT departments would not immediately jump ship to a rival push-email service but would begin considering alternative provisions.  It is likely that today’s problem will only encourage that search.