RIM suffered a service outage that affected around five million BlackBerry users in Europe and Africa on Friday.

Thorsten Heins, the company's CEO, apologised and promised to find out and communicate the cause of the problem that hit six percent of its user base.

"We are conducting a full technical analysis of this quality of service issue and will report as soon as it concludes," he said in a statement.

The failure took place on the same day as the release of Apple’s iPhone 5, and RIM’s share price dropped by as much as 6 percent during the outage, Reuters reported.

RIM’s delivery system routes messages through its own datacentres to encrypt and compress the content. This gave the company an advantage on the corporate market as it was seen as the best way to protect enterprise data.

However, routing messages through RIM’s own datacentres means there is a single point for potential failure.

RIM’s BlackBerry email and instant messaging services suffered a four-day global outage in October 2011, with the then co-CEOs criticised for taking several days to apologise for the problem.

Speaking to Reuters, CCS Insight analyst John Jackson said problem shows that an issue still exists despite the outage a year ago.

RIM’s customer growth has slowed in recent years with the arrival of the iPhone and Android devices with the company’s market share and share price being hit hard. The company is currently preparing to launch new devices running its next-generation BlackBerry 10 OS next year after several delays.