BlackBerry's services once again took a nose dive for users in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East—the company's UK Twitter account confirmed the outage at 3:58am CT Friday morning, and the service was up and working again by 7:12am, leaving the affected users without BlackBerry services for at least three or four hours.

The latest outage doesn't appear to be nearly as wide-ranging as last year's, which covered a larger geographical area (it spread to Asia and North America) and lasted longer—after the four-day outage was finally resolved, the company was quickly hit with a class-action lawsuit in spite of its attempts to appease its rankled customers with free apps and enterprise technical support.

Things aren't looking so rosy for BlackBerry and RIM—its next major handset and mobile operating system, BlackBerry 10, have already been delayed into 2013, and the company's financials aren't looking so great either. It may not be long before the BlackBerry service's periodic outages become more permanent.