Research In Motion (RIM) has suffered a major Blackberry outage across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, a failure that could see more users shifting to its competitors, The Inquirer reports.

The badly timed failure lands on the morning of Apple's Iphone 5 launch, and has reportedly left thousands of Blackberry users without access to their email or Blackberry Messenger (BBM). A few of us here at The INQUIRER have fallen victim to the Blackberry outage, and it seems to be affecting users across all UK mobile operators.

A Blackberry spokesperson said, "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. We apologize to any customers who may be affected."

A Vodafone executive also confirmed the Blackberry outage, telling us, "As far as we can tell all Blackberry services have gone down. This is a RIM issue and is affecting all devices across all networks.

"We haven't had any official communication from RIM just yet however when we do get more information I will let you know the details," he added.

This failure comes almost exactly a year after RIM's last high profile outage, which saw users left without access to Blackberry services for days.