NEW YORK — A service outage afflicted users of the popular, addictive BlackBerry smart phones across the United States and Canada yesterday.

Officials with AT&T Inc. and Verizon Wireless said BlackBerry maker Research in Motion Ltd. told them customers of all wireless carriers were affected.

It was not immediately clear how many of the 12 million worldwide BlackBerry subscribers had problems, as some users reported being able to access their service normally yesterday afternoon.

But Garth Turner, a member of the Canadian Parliament, said during a caucus meeting that the incident — the second widespread disruption in 10 months — was having a big impact.

"Everyone's in crisis because they're all picking away at their BlackBerrys and nothing's happening," Turner said. "It's almost like cutting the phone cables or a total collapse in telegraph lines a century ago. It just isolates people in a way that's quite phenomenal."

Bell Canada spokesman Jason Laszlo said most of its BlackBerry customers were affected. "There's really no estimated time of repair," Laszlo said.

The BlackBerry service lets users check e-mail and access other data services on their handheld devices. In a statement, RIM said a "data service interruption" was resulting in "intermittent service delays for BlackBerry subscribers in North America." The company said voice and text messaging services were not affected.

There was no word on what caused the outage or when service would be restored.

Stuart Gold, a customer who says he gets 1,000 e-mails a day as director of field marketing for Web analytics company Omniture Inc., worked on his laptop most of yesterday after his BlackBerry went on the blink.

Although Gold said he thought last year's outage gave him a needed break from work, yesterday's frayed his last nerve.

"I cannot believe this happened again," he said. "I'm on the road 300 days a year. My entire life is in my BlackBerry — my family life, my professional life, my emotional life, everything. ... They're not allowed to do this to me."

Gold, 49, said he plans to ask his company to buy him a second smart phone from a rival as a backup. BlackBerry competitors include Palm Inc.'s Treo.