The three big takeaways from yesterday's BlackBerry email outage

Remember those early reports we broke (before anyone else, by the way), of BlackBerry email outages on T-Mobile?

Well, as colleague Erica Ogg reports, those early outages were just the start of something far more widespread.

BlackBerry users who are also customers of Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon complained of slow e-mail or completely interrupted mobile data service. Corporate customers of Research In Motion did not seem to be affected.

Erica then reproduces this statement from Research In Motion, as cited by Silicon Alley Insider:

"Some customers using BlackBerry Internet Service experienced a delay this afternoon in sending or receiving e-mail. The issue has since been resolved and no messages were lost. RIM continues to investigate the matter. Service for BlackBerry Enterprise Server customers was not impacted. RIM apologizes to customers for any inconvenience."

If you remember the outage in April, you may recall that CEO Jim Balsillie subsequently promised during an interview with eWeek that a similar glitch would never happen again.

Well, three observations from me:

AT&T service was not cited as having been affected. Perhaps there are best practices lessons to be learned?

Why is it that RIM STILL (and I am shouting) still hasn't learned to post news and updates of major outages on their website- or, at least- strongly suggest that their carriers do so?

Never a good idea to make promises you can't keep. And not only in technology.