For the second time just weeks, Blackberry’s across North America are falling silent as the data stops flowing.

Once again, the ‘Net is abuzz with reports of an outage of Blackberry Internet Services (BIS), the consumer data gatekeeper for Blackberry users. So far, it seems that the outage is affecting all data services except for e-mail. That includes PIN messages, web browsing, Blackberry Messenger and any other application that requires data services (eg. twitter, weather updates, etc.).

This is the second data outage in a month for the Blackberry.  The last time it was e-mail services that went down.  That outage lasted for more than a day for many customers in the US and Canada as well as many other parts of the world.  That outage was blamed on a server glitch during maintenance.

What will the cause be this time, server gremlins?

Update 1:  According to those in the Crackberry Forums email is now down too.

Update 2:  Crackberry.com is now reporting that the fix may take up to one day to be implemented!

Update 3:  Looks like the Blackberry messenger did it:

“RIM Statement – December 23rd

A service interruption occurred Tuesday that affected BlackBerry customers in the Americas. Message delivery was delayed or intermittent during the service interruption. Phone service and SMS services on BlackBerry smartphones were unaffected. Root cause is currently under review, but based on preliminary analysis, it currently appears that the issue stemmed from a flaw in two recently released versions of BlackBerry Messenger (versions 5.0.0.55 and 5.0.0.56) that caused an unanticipated database issue within the BlackBerry infrastructure. RIM has taken corrective action to restore service.

RIM has also provided a new version of BlackBerry Messenger (version 5.0.0.57) and is encouraging anyone who downloaded or upgraded BlackBerry Messenger since December 14th to upgrade to this latest version which resolves the issue. RIM continues to monitor its systems to maintain normal service levels and apologizes for any inconvenience to customers.“