RIM restores BlackBerry services after outage across Europe

Research in Motion (RIM) has confirmed it has restored services across Europe, the Middle East and Africa after a reported outage at a datacentre in Slough knocked out access to email, web and messaging services for millions of customers.

The firm first confirmed the issue on its Twitter account during Monday afternoon and it lasted well into the early hours of Tuesday before RIM finally confirmed that the issues had been resolved.

"Yesterday, some BlackBerry subscribers in the EMEA region experienced delays with BlackBerry services," it said.

"The issue was resolved and services are operating normally. We apologise to those customers who were impacted for any inconvenience."

Reports suggest it was mainly consumer customers on the BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS) system that were affected, rather than business users on the the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) product, but the incident is still hugely embarrassing for RIM.

The company is struggling to compete with the growth of rival smartphones powered by Android and the iPhone, while recent sales figures have been hugely disappointing.

Meanwhile, its attempts to gain traction in the growing tablet market have so far proved unsuccessful, with its PlayBook devices failing to excite consumers, businesses or investors.