BlackBerry email has been restored after some subscribers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa lost access to their data.

"Some customers may continue to experience delays with instant messaging and browsing services and our technical teams are working to return services to normal operation as quickly as possible," Research in Motion, its Canada-based owners said.

"We apologise to our customers."

The company did not say what caused  the problem. 

RIM has struggled this year with weaker sales of the BlackBerry smartphone against rivals like Apple's iPhone, various models from HTC, and other handsets running Google's Android software.

The company's share price fell 0.56 per cent to $23.23 yesterday after the outage news, and was down 60 per cent from the beginning of the year.