Hundreds of people were left without access to their emails and the internet yesterday after O2's BlackBerry service failed.

The outage, which began shortly before noon, and lasted until after 6pm, only affected O2 BlackBerry customers.

Users were not informed of the issue unless they contacted O2 directly. O2 did not publish any notification on their website despite the fact that the problem lasted for several hours.

A spokesman for O2 said:

 

Due to a technical issue which affected connectivity between O2 Ireland and Research In Motion (RIM), owners of the Blackberry service, O2's Blackberry customers were unable to send and receive emails. Voice and text services were unaffected. O2 apologises to affected customers for any inconvenience caused,

 

The outage has only affected O2 users. Blackberry users on other network remained unaffected by the issues.