Research In Motion on Wednesday was forced to issue an apology after its BlackBerry users suffered their second e-mail outage in a week.

BlackBerry users faced a service outage on Tuesday that lasted until early Wednesday morning, affecting e-mails, text messages, and Web services such as Twitter and Facebook.

"RIM continues to monitor its systems to maintain normal service levels and apologizes for any inconvenience to customers," the company said in a statement.

The Waterloo, Ontario, BlackBerry maker restored the service on Wednesday morning, blaming the outages on a flaw in its instant-messaging program called BlackBerry Messenger.

Last Thursday, BlackBerry users had faced the same problem while trying to access their e-mail. The company also experienced major outages in April 2007 and February 2008.

“Based on preliminary analysis, it appears a flaw in two recently released versions of BlackBerry Messenger caused an unanticipated database issue within the BlackBerry infrastructure,” RIM said in a statement.

A new version of BlackBerry Messenger was made available on Wednesday and the company urges its customers to upgrade to this version.

Source:redherring