BlackBerry maker Research in Motion (RIM) has confirmed it is experiencing a service outage across parts of Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
The scale of the outage is not yet clear, nor is the cause.
The company has said via its Twitter feed that, "Some users in Europe, Middle East & Africa are experiencing issues with their BlackBerry service. We are investigating and apologise for any inconvenience."
A statement sent to CBR revealed no further details than what had already been said in the tweets.
The timing of this outage is particularly damaging for RIM as today is the day Apple’s iPhone 5 finally goes on sale. The success of the iPhone is one of the reasons BlackBerry sales have plummeted; quite simply users would rather buy an iPhone rather than a BlackBerry.
RIM suffered a hugely embarrassing outage last year when the service was disrupted across the world for three days. The company blamed that outage on a "core switch failure". It was criticised at the time for its slow response to the crisis; it took three days for the then-CEO Mike Lazaridis to speak publicly.
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