For as long as 14 hours, belts across America didn't vibrate. Thumbs stopped clacking on tiny keyboards. People were transported to a more innocent age, a time when sitcoms could be watched uninterrupted and meetings had to be arranged by, gasp, phone.
The BlackBerry e-mail network went down around 5 p.m. Pacific time Tuesday, and David Hyman, an online music executive, suddenly knew how it felt to be an addict. He was trying to retrieve electronic messages as he drove across the San Francisco Bay Bridge.
"I push that button like a nervous habit, all day, all night," he said. "When you don't get your e-mail, you're like a drug user cut from your source."
Research in Motion, the Canadian company that makes the BlackBerry, wouldn't say why its e-mail system crashed, halting messages for most of its 5.8 million North American customers until it largely restored service by late Wednesday morning.
Voice calls weren't affected -- but important late-night e-mails didn't get through.
Scott Mitchell Rosenberg, a comic-book executive in Los Angeles, keeps two BlackBerrys -- one with Cingular, the other with Verizon Wireless -- in case one goes down. After both failed him, he drove more than an hour to a morning meeting at 20th Century Fox only to learn it had been postponed via e-mail during the night.
"Because it happened overnight, it was worse than had it happened in the afternoon," he said.
Many people, so hooked that they call the devices CrackBerrys, didn't know what to do with themselves during the first nationwide BlackBerry outage in more than two years.
The pain was particularly acute in the nation's capital. If politics is the lifeblood of Washington, the BlackBerry is a major artery.
Forget national security issues -- stranded e-mails were the first order of business at a White House press briefing Wednesday morning.
"I apologize to a number of you who tried e-mailing over the last 14 hours," White House spokesman Tony Fratto told reporters, adding that his team had "started a 12-step group" to cope with the loss.
"This entire town runs on BlackBerrys," said Michael Petricone, senior vice president of government affairs for the Consumer Electronics Assn., who kept reflexively checking his device even though he knew it wasn't working. "The only thing here that's worse than a BlackBerry outage is a snowstorm -- and the impact is pretty similar."
