Blackberry email outage hits users in Europe, Middle East, Africa and India

An email outage on BlackBerry hit users in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and India for several hours, adding to the troubles of Research in Motion, which is being talked about as a takeover target.

Twitter users and correspondents of Reuters from Britain to Dubai to New Delhi said the services were disrupted or suffered complete collapse of their email and BlackBerry Messenger services.

RIM told Reuters in an email, "We are working to resolve an issue currently impacting some BlackBerry subscribers in Europe, Middle East and Africa and India."

The company's statement in Europe and Canada, said the same thing in an identical manner omitting reference to India, however.

"We are investigating, and we apologise to our customers for any inconvenience caused whilst this is resolved," RIM said, declining to provide further detail.

The company's once owned the corporate mobile email market, but has progressively lost share to smartphone rivals such as the iPhone with employees from the boardroom down demanding more choice.