Will BlackBerry's outage stop deal flow?

Research in Motion Limited (NASDAQ: RIMM) 8 million BlackBerry subscribers are no doubt in panic mode this morning. A network failure that started at 8 p.m. ET Tuesday has affected BlackBerrys throughout the Western hemisphere by preventing emails from being pushed to the handheld devices.

I don't know anybody who uses the service, which shows you how out of the deal flow I am, but in my imagination there are investment bankers, traders, private equity people, hedge funds, lawyers, and executives who are cut off from their CrackBerry. And I'm just focusing on the New York deal flow. No doubt there are Washington political staffers, lobbyists, lawyers and politicians who are also agonizing over the sudden disconnect from their email endorphin drip.

RIMM is down 2% in pre-market trading and I would expect that cell phone traffic will be the primary beneficiary as people who would normally communicate via BlackBerry whip out their cell phones to take up the slack. Although Verizon Communications, Inc. (NYSE: VZ), Sprint Nextel Corp. (NYSE: S), AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) may benefit, investors are not bidding up the stocks in pre-market, which could either mean I'm wrong or the additional traffic will not be sufficient to add significantly to earnings.

Are you a BlackBerry subscriber? How are you coping with the system failure?

Update: At 9:55 a.m. EDT, RIMM announced that service was back for most users. Is your service on?

Peter Cohan is President of Peter S. Cohan & Associates, a management consulting and venture capital firm. He also teaches management at Babson College and edits The Cohan Letter. He has no financial interest in the securities mentioned in this post.