For as long as 14 hours, belts across America didn't vibrate. Thumbs stopped clacking on tiny keyboards. People were transported to a more innocent age, a time when sitcoms could be watched uninterrupted and breakfast meetings had to be arranged by — gasp! — phone.

The BlackBerry e-mail network went down about 8 p.m. Eastern time Tuesday, and David Hyman, an online music executive, suddenly knew how it felt to be an addict. He was trying to retrieve electronic messages as he drove across the Bay Bridge in San Francisco.

"I push that button like a nervous habit, all day, all night," he said. "When you don't get your e-mail, you're like a drug user cut from your source."

Research In Motion, the Canadian company that makes the BlackBerry, wouldn't say why its e-mail system crashed, halting messages for most of its 5.8 million North American customers until it largely restored service by midday yesterday.

Voice calls weren't affected — but late-night e-mails didn't get through.

Scott Mitchell Rosenberg, a Los Angeles comic-book executive, keeps two BlackBerrys — one with Cingular, the other with Verizon Wireless — in case one goes down. He drove more than an hour to a morning meeting at 20th Century Fox, only to learn that an e-mail postponing it had been sent out during the night. "Because it happened overnight, it was worse than had it happened in the afternoon," he said.

Many people, so hooked that they call the devices CrackBerrys, didn't know what to do with themselves during the first nationwide BlackBerry outage in more than two years.

The pain was particularly acute in the nation's capital. Politics is the lifeblood of Washington, and the BlackBerry is a major artery.

Stranded e-mails were the first order of business at a White House press briefing yesterday, where presidential spokesman Tony Fratto told reporters his team had "started a 12-step group" to cope with the loss.

"This entire town runs on BlackBerrys," said Michael Petricone, senior vice president for government affairs at the Consumer Electronics Association, who kept reflexively checking his device even though he knew it wasn't working. "The only thing here that's worse than a BlackBerry outage is a snowstorm — and the impact is pretty similar."

Souheil Badran, an Internet executive in Milwaukee, usually catches up on e-mail from his company's Swedish offices over morning coffee. When he found no new messages on his BlackBerry yesterday, he thought it was a Swedish holiday.

"I must admit that the coffee tasted better and reading the paper was more enjoyable," he said.

Carmi Levy, an analyst at Info-Tech Research Group in London, Ontario, said the root cause of the outage was in the core network near Research In Motion's Ontario headquarters. It caused a backup in e-mail that left the system unable to handle even the diminished traffic at that late hour. "It raises questions about the robustness of the system," Levy said.