It wasn't too long ago that we were anticipating and planning for a possible BlackBerry outage, due to NTP's patent issues with Research In Motion. That dark day never came, but a BlackBerry blackout did occur on April 17 into April 18. For what must have seemed like an eternity to the CrackBerry users of the world, service came to a standstill.

I'm definitely e-mail-dependent, but I haven't gone the BlackBerry route. I guess I know my limits--and how easily I'd be hooked if I had constant (or, almost constant, it turns out) access to e-mail. It's not that I know that many people or am so very important that things would cease to function were I not connected while, say, grocery shopping. It's just that, once I'm on e-mail, I have a hard time getting off.

But, enough about me. What about the millions of people who do depend on their BlackBerry devices for actual serious work? I contacted one of them, Carl Ashkin, to see how the blackout affected corporate users.

Carl is the CEO of the Darby Group and a longtime eWEEK Corporate Partner. Turns out he and the IT staff at his organization have been guarding against just such a situation, but were surprised nonetheless by something they hadn't thought about.

"Today's BlackBerry blackout turned out to not be as problematic as it might have been four months ago," said Carl in an e-mail to me dated April 18. "Back in December, we started an internal program to offer key executives as well as power users the option to move from the BlackBerry devices that they were carrying over to Windows Mobile devices. Many of our users have been taking advantage of this option as it provided greater device options."

So, the Windows Mobile users were safe, but what about the BlackBerry holdouts?

Carl continued: "We experienced significant problems with our users who are still carrying their BlackBerry devices. However, while it was inconvenient for our BlackBerry users, I can say that we did not lose any e-mails and that the major impact was that the majority of our users experienced long delays in the delivery of their e-mails to their BlackBerry devices. Users who contacted our help desk were directed to use our Web mail as a temporary workaround."

So, lesson learned?

"One of the items we are now evaluating as a result of today's BlackBerry blackout is our reliance on an outside vendor's network operations center to support our mobile e-mail users," Carl said. "Of course, we will more than likely always be reliant on the wireless carriers to provide us with a connection to our mobile devices. Even so, today's BlackBerry blackout has forced us to take a hard look at the benefits of using BlackBerry devices given that the service introduces a second critical point of failure (the RIM NOC) that can impact so many of our users."

How did the BlackBerry outage affect you? Or did it? Let me know.