Most M3 Wireless customers were unaffected by the outage which disrupted internet service for BlackBerry users across North America earlier this week, the company said.

In a statement relased on Wednesday afternoon, M3 said a fault had occurred on the BlackBerry infrastructure from 9.15 on Tuesday evening.

Michael Beckles, M3's vice-president, network operations said: "Our vendor partner, Research in Motion (RIM), notified us that the service outage lasted until approximately 6.45 a.m. AST, at which time they reset the service which brought traffic back to close to normal levels."

The company added that a small number of customers had reported that they were unable to send and receive emails and others reported that they could not access internet service. Some customers, when they performed a hard reset by removing the battery, the re-inserting it and turning on the power, found they were able to resume BlackBerry service.

"Our BlackBerry partner, Research in Motion (RIM) is a highly reputable and stable vendor and we found their team was extremely responsive in dealing with this unexpected issue, considering this interruption occurred throughout the Americas and was resolved in less than 24 hours," Mr. Beckles added.

"Our RIM partners inform us that they are currently investigating the root cause of the issue and will inform us as soon as that information becomes available."