RIM admits to more BlackBerry outages in Europe, Africa and South America

Research in Motion (RIM) has confirmed that for the second time in two days a huge outage has affected its BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS) system, downing messaging and internet services for millions of customers worldwide.

On Monday the firm admitted that customers in Europe, Africa and the Middle East were seeing problems with email, web and text services, but said on Tuesday morning that it had fixed the problem, believed to have originated from a server in Slough.

However, the firm confirmed on Tuesday afternoon that problems are reccurring for customers in these regions while users in India, Brazil, Chile and Argentina are also being affected.

"Some users in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, India, Brazil, Chile, and Argentina are experiencing messaging and browsing delays," noted a statement.

"We are working to restore normal service as quickly as possible. We apologise for any inconvenience this has caused."

The news comes as RIM battles to fend off the surge in popularity for Apple's iPhone and the slew of Android devices hitting the market.

Second-quarter revenues at the Canadian firm were $4.2bn, a drop of 15 per cent from the previous quarter as sales of smartphones fell sharply.

Its attempts to rival the iPad in the tablet market also took a tumble after poor sales of its PlayBook device led to rumours the firm was preparing to ditch the device in the same way HP was forced to halt production of the TouchPad.