BlackBerry Service Goes Down in Europe, Africa

Not a good thing to happen on day of iPhone's release

Struggling BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion said Friday it resolved an outage affecting users in Europe, Middle East and Africa that had interrupted service for customers on the very day Apple Inc. unveiled its new iPhone 5.

BlackBerry announced the issues in postings on Facebook and Twitter on Friday, and said it fixed the troubles after a few hours. It apologized to customers for the inconvenience caused.

The outage brought up unpleasant memories of last year's troubles with emails and chat messages that left many users bereft for up to three days.