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BlackBerry services are being misused in Al Ain and Ras Al Khaimah to malign establishments and individuals. Image Credit: Javed Nawab/Gulf News Archive

Dubai: BlackBerry services were restored on Friday after users reported outages across Middle East, Europe and Africa earlier in the day.

Early Friday morning, users reported problems sending emails and using Blackberry BBM services.

“It seems that we have an outage here in Europe [Greece] for last two hours. I have more than 300 users — and they can’t send or receive email and even BBM it seems that it is not working,” reported one user on crackberry.com forum around 3:10am.

Blackberry said it restored services not long after the outage and assured users that the system, owned by Canadian firm Research in Motion, were back in full operations.

“Our apologies to any customers impacted by the BlackBerry service issue today. We can confirm that services have been restored and are now operating normally,” said a BlackBerry Middle East spokesperson in a statement emailed to Gulf News.

The outage was minor compared to downed services in October 2011 when BlackBerry users in the UAE were forced to do without services for up to three days.

Last year’s outage affected professionals who said at the time that it was difficult to conduct daily business without the use of their encrypted BBM and email services.