BlackBerry users in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and India could not email, send instant message and surf the web on Monday.

Manufacturer Research in Motion (RIM) immediately issued an apology and announcement that it is resolving the disruption and outage of data service that started 10:20 a.m. in London. The Canadian firm did not say what is the cause of the problem but is investigating the issue.

"We are investigating, and we apologise to our customers for any inconvenience caused whilst this is resolved," RIM said, according to Reuters.

BlackBerry owners and service providers revealed the service disruption via Twitter. U.K.'s T-Mobile, Kenya's Safari.com, Egypt's Vodafone, United Arab Emirates' Du and Kuwait's Wataniya Telecom reported the downtime. Some users, however, tweeted that service downtime abated starting 4:45 p.m.

It is not known how many users were affected but there are an estimated 70 million subscribers of the RIM phone worldwide.