BlackBerry suffered an embarrassing outage affecting users in Europe, Middle East and Africa on Friday, interrupting service for customers as Apple's hot new iPhone 5 was available in stores.
    
BlackBerry announced the issues in postings on Facebook and Twitter, and later issued a statement to media  apologizing for the problem which the company said had 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,'' the company said in an email.

The outage brings up unpleasant memories of troubles with emails and chat messages last year that left users bereft for three days.

In Canada and the United States, the outage was apparently shorter, but many of the world's 70 million BlackBerry users were affected.

The timing could not have been worse as the new iPhone 5 went on sale, putting competitive pressure on BlackBerry. It has already lost significant market share due to delays in bringing out new devices to compete with Apple iPhones, iPads and devices using Google's Android operating system.