BlackBerry users on the Vodafone network have suffered an outage this morning, following a service issue at BlackBerry operator Research in Motion.

UPDATE: RIM said that a 12:49pm "that services have been restored and are now operating normally".

The outage affected services including email, mobile Internet and messaging service BBM.

Although the outage appears to have only affected Vodafone customers – including businesses and consumers – the mobile telco has placed the blame squarely with RIM.

"Vodafone has not been given an estimated fix time but we’re asking RIM to keep us updated," the company said in a statement to customers.

RIM posted the following statement on its Facebook page: "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."

The outage is another blow to one of RIM’s remaining selling points: the perceived reliability of its back-end services. An extended outage in October last year, triggered by a network switch failure, angered customers and added to a run of bad news for the Canadian company.

RIM offered business customers one free month of support in order to atone for that outage.