The now-infamous Blackberry outage could end up costing manufacturer Research in Motion (RIM) a pretty penny, the Financial Post reports. How much? Possibly $100 million, or 5 cents in earnings per share.

The most severe BlackBerry service disruption in the history of Research In Motion Ltd. could cost the Canadian mobile device maker more than US$100-million in lost revenues.

As some argue the damage to RIM’s future ability to brand its smartphones as immensely reliable is near total, Wall Street is focusing more specifically on the financial impact from the three-day outage. RIM charges wireless carriers a monthly fee for each active BlackBerry user, Rod Hall of JPMorgan Chase and Co. reminded clients on Friday.

While acknowledging a large margin of error in his estimates as the specifics of carrier agreements are private, the analyst is nonetheless convinced RIM will have to give at least some of those fees back. Expecting a little over US$1-billion in service fee revenues for the company’s third quarter, set to end in November, Mr. Hall estimates 5¢ in lost earnings per share is possible.

“We calculate that each 1% lost at the top line represents about a penny of lost EPS,” he said.

“Given a large portion of global traffic looks potentially affected we believe that a 5% impact to service fee revenue is plausible though likely worst case.”

In fact, one analyst tells the Financial Post it’s the “worst outage the company has experienced” and could cost “a month’s worth of BlackBerry fees to its carrier partners for half of its subscriber base”. He estimates costs as high as $117 million. Network problems can be costly.