Canada’s Research in Motion (RIM) confirmed on Friday that it was experiencing renewed problems with BlackBerry network services in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

The outage appears less widespread than the October 2011 meltdown but is affecting access to BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) and the BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS) for some users.

RIM in SA says the problem is specific to mobile operators and “none of the carriers in SA are affected” by the outage.

“We are currently experiencing a BlackBerry service issue impacting some users in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. All relevant support teams are working to resolve the issue. We apologise to any customers who may be affected.”

Unlike other handset manufacturers, which rely on local mobile operators to route their data traffic, RIM handles all e-mail and messaging flows using its own network of servers.

Last October, RIM encountered an outage that lasted three days and which spread around the world. The company was widely lambasted for taking hours to issue a statement about the problem and leaving users in the dark about what caused it.

The company eventually issued a lengthy statement outlining what had caused the service interruption and founder and then co-CEO Mike Lazaridis issued a video apology, saying the company had let its customers down.

RIM later offered customers free applications by way of compensation.