Thousands of Wall Street workers went through “Crack-Berry” withdrawal yesterday after a widespread network failure stopped e-mails reaching their BlackBerrys on Tuesday night.

For some users, the service was restored by late morning, but many said that their devices were still not working yesterday afternoon.

Customers were advised that it would take hours for servers to deal with the backlog.

Phone calls were unaffected, but e-mail services — the principal tool on which BlackBerry owners rely — failed completely, frustrating bankers and lawyers.

“I’m in the middle of a $1.3 billion deal at the moment — it’s been a real ball ache,” one solicitor with a large US firm said.

“It’s a total debacle,” a New York-based investment banker said. “We can’t send or receive e-mails, we can’t browse the web. It’s an absolute crisis.”

RIM, the maker of BlackBerry, did not elaborate on why the failure had occurred but said that the “root cause” of the interruption was “under review”. Its systems were being “closely monitored” to ensure that normal service was maintained.

E-mail had been restored to “most customers overnight”, the Canadian company said.

Bankers and other Wall Street workers first began to report the network failure at about 8pm eastern time on Tuesday. Although some carriers, such as Cingular, said that the service had resumed as of 6am, others, including Verizon, said that some customers were still having problems by late morning.

A secretary at a leading US law firm said that people were “suffering more from withdrawal than panicking”.

“At least Brickbreaker is still working,” read a post on one internet forum, referring to the device’s popular built-in computer game.

Goldman Sachs gave notice of the problem at 7.45am London time, saying that all workers based or roaming in North America were out of touch.

By 1.15pm, the bank had told its staff in London that the American service was being restored but it would take several hours to clear the backlog of unsent e-mails.

The effects of the interruption were felt as far away as Liuzhou, southwestern China, where executives from General Motors found themselves without access to e-mails from the company’s headquarters in Michigan. Shares in RIM were unaffected by the glitch, closing 1.76 per cent up at C$151.44.

Handy figures

47% Increase in RIM’s earnings over the past year

8m Total worldwise Blackberry subscriber base

1.02m Number of subscribers added in the fourth quarter

20% Blackberry’s share of the global PDA market

$250m Amount by which RIM said it would restate earnings after an inquiry into stock-option grant procedures

Source: Gartner, Times database

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