Research in Motion has claimed it has fixed today’s BlackBerry outage that left users across EMEA without access for around seven hours.

The cause of the service disruption is still unknown, as is the number of users affected. It appears at the moment that it was just Vodafone users that were knocked offline by the outage.

However the company says it has restored access following the unexplained outage.

"Our apologies to any customers impacted by the BlackBerry service issue today. We can confirm that services have been restored and are now operating normally," the company said in a statement.

Its Twitter feed added: "Some users experienced issues with BlackBerry services today. Apologies for any inconvenience caused. All services now operating normally."

In a statement CEO Thorsten Heins apologised to affected customers and said an investigation is underway to determine the cause of the disruption.

"I want to apologize to those BlackBerry customers in Europe and Africa who experienced an impact in their quality of service earlier this morning," he said. "The BlackBerry service is now fully restored and I can report that no data or messages were lost."

"Up to 6 percent of our user base may have been impacted. Preliminary analysis suggests that those customers may have experienced a maximum delay of 3 hours in the delivery and reception of their messages. We are conducting a full technical analysis of this quality of service issue and will report as soon as it concludes," he added.

As CBR pointed out this morning, this latest BlackBerry service disruption could not have come at a worst time for RIM; today marks the day Apple releases the iPhone 5.