RIM outage may have come from service upgrade

BARCELONA (Reuters) - An outage which hit the BlackBerry mobile e-email service on Monday may have been caused by an upgrade to the systems of owner Research In Motion, its co-chief executive Jim Balsillie said on Tuesday.

The popular e-mail service was down for about three hours across North America on Monday afternoon.

"At the core virtually all these things tend to happen on service upgrades," Balsillie said in an interview with Reuters at the Mobile World Congress, but he added that the company was still working on getting to the root of the problem.