Blackberry Outage Blamed on Upgrade

The company behind the Blackberry smart phones said Monday's three hour outage was caused by an upgrade designed to increase capacity. Research in Motion Ltd. said the upgrade was part of routine and ongoing efforts, and that similar upgrades in the past resulted in no problems. The outage, which started about 2:30 p.m. CST, annoyed subscribers who are used to having their emails available whenever they are in cellular coverage. It affected only some of the Blackberry users in North America. For others, the service kept working.