Research In Motion Inc. (RIM), maker of the popular BlackBerry smartphone, apologized Monday for the more than two hours of service disruption that affected millions of its customers in the U.S. and Canada.

According to Networkworld.com, the "service disruption" that affected RIM's infrastructure starting at 3:30 p.m. EST prevented BlackBerry phones from sending or receiving messages, browsing the Internet or using the BlackBerry Internet Service Web site.

However, Ctv.ca reported that "other features of the hand-held device, such as voice calls and short-message services (SMS), are not affected."

RIM notified customers of this problem, disconnection and other service interruptions. The service normalized at 6 p.m.

The wide-scale service disruption was the second to hit BlackBerry users in 10 months. BlackBerry customers were also affected when AT&T experienced network disruption.

There are an estimated 12 million users of BlackBerry worldwide.