It's not just you: Blackberry outage reported

Blackberry appears to be having some problems in the Washington D.C. region. This kind of an outage has the potential to cripple communications on Capitol Hill and cause a bit of panic for reporters who haven't received email in several hours.

From other blog reports, it appears to be affecting customers of T-Mobile, Verizon and AT&T. The problems do not appear to be affecting other Blackberry functions like Web browsing.

Update: (11:01 a.m.)--We got this response from RIM:  "BlackBerry customers in North America may be currently experiencing delays receiving email. Our technical teams are working to resolve this issue for those impacted. Phone services, browsing and PIN-to-PIN messaging are not impacted. We apologize for any inconvenience."

As Christina Wilkie reports from the Capitol, congressional staffers are also feeling the pinch, especially as many House members travel home for the holiday recess and rely on their Blackberries to communicate with staff from the road.

Said one GOP House staffer, "My boss is on his way to the airport right now, and he called a few minutes ago wondering why no one was responding to his emails [sent via Blackberry], and none of us had gotten them."

She added, "We all planned to go out to lunch today, but now we're chained to our desks until [Blackberry] email is working again."