BlackBerry suffered an outage affecting users in Europe, Middle East and Africa on Friday

BlackBerry, made by Waterloo, Ont.-based Research in Motion, announced the issues in postings on Facebook and Twitter, and later issued a statement to media  apologizing for the problem — which the company said had been fixed.

“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,” the company said in an e-mail.

The outage brings up unpleasant memories of troubles with e-mails and chat messages last year that left users bereft for three days.

In Canada and the United States, the outage was apparently shorter, but many of the world’s 70-million BlackBerry users were affected.

The timing could not have been worse as the new iPhone 5 went on sale, putting competitive pressure on BlackBerry. It has already lost significant market share due to delays in bringing out new devices to compete with Apple iPhones, iPads and devices using Google’s Android operating system.