UPDATED: UK BlackBerry users hit by new service outage

Blackberry maker RIM claims to have fixed the issue that caused a number of UK users to suffer technical difficulties.

The company confirmed the service issue in a statement to IT Pro earlier today: "We are currently experiencing a BlackBerry service issue impacting some users in Europe, Middle East and Africa.

"All relevant support teams are working to resolve the issue," it added.

Shortly afterwards, a company spokesperson said the issue had now been fixed.

"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," it said.

Even so, BlackBerry smartphone users had taken to social networking site Twitter to air their frustrations at the firm's latest outage, with many pointing out that - with the Apple iPhone 5 hitting stores today - its problems could not have come at a worse time.

This afternoon, the vendor released a further statement, confirming that up to six per cent of the firm's EMEA user base may have been affected, but stressed that no data or messages had been lost.

Thorsten Heins, RIM President and CEO, said in the statement: "Preliminary analysis suggests 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."

The is not the first time BlackBerry users have experienced problems. In October of 2011, a similar disruption left them unable to send and receive email and text messages for several days.