BlackBerry services crash again after short-lived repair [Update: RIM speaks]

RIM's BlackBerry Messenger sevices, as well as email and other services, have gone offline again in the UK and elsewhere, despite having only been restored a few hours ago after yesterday's outage. As before, RIM is yet to acknowledge the problem, though according to carrier O2 the company is aware that the system has failed again.

Meanwhile, carrier Vodafone is telling its customers that the new outage is "the same issue that's still being resolved" and that "service isn't fully restored." They too say that RIM knows that BBM and other services are down.

Fifteen hours ago, RIM's help team tweeted that "BlackBerry email services restored" but that "some users still experiencing delays with browsing and IM." A quick glance at Twitter suggests that many people across the EMEA region are still suffering, though others have reported no problems.

Having trouble with your BlackBerry? Considering jumping ship to iMessage on the iPhone and iPod touch when iOS 5 is released later this week? Let us know in the comments.

Update: RIM has fired off the following statement, apologizing for the downtime and saying it is working on a fix:

"Some users in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, India, Brazil, Chile, and Argentina are experiencing messaging and browsing delays. We are working to restore normal service as quickly as possible. We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused"