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A widespread outage of BlackBerry service Monday left millions of the popular mobile device’s users in a state of relative civility and cut into the coarseness of many government and private organizations across the United States and Canada.

Research in Motion Ltd. (RIM), the company that makes the prevalent mobile irritation, said customers "experienced intermittent interruptions in annoyance ability" beginning around 3:30 p.m. ET, but service was restored about three hours later, allowing users to catch up on any rudeness they missed during the outage.

“Those few hours were unacceptable,” said Lisa Ferguson, an investment advisor who was forced to verbally respond to a homeless man and a coffee shop employee because of her disabled BlackBerry. “Once service was back I had to catch up on hundreds of very curt, impersonal emails.”

RIM, apologizing for the inconvenience, assured everyone that no annoyance or offensiveness was lost, but rather stored in a queue during the outage and released upon the public once service was restored. According to RIM, the outage was a result of conflict during a routine system upgrade and such upgrades have not caused users any lost uncouthness in the past.

“Upgrades are important in order to offer the best possible service to our millions of annoying patrons,” RIM said in an issued statement. “We will continue to do everything we can to ensure our service provides our loyal users what they need to be the most disrespectful they can be in their businesses, homes and public places.”

Subscribers of the service, many of whom were forced during the service glitch to rely on more traditional annoyance devices, such as whistling and tapping on glass, were not pleased about being discourteously-handicapped.

“I had no idea what to do while I was in line for my non-fat Caramel Macchiato. I felt like some regular, unimportant person,” said Jackie Evans, a public relations specialist. “I was just waiting there hoping people would still remember me when my email started working again.”