A BlackBerry outage strikes during iPhone launch week—for the second year in a row

Earlier today, Research in Motion’s U.K. branch acknowledged that users in Europe, the Middle East and Africa were having service problems, which is poor timing, since the company is competing against iPhone 5 launch mania this week. We imagine the outage will spark a few oddball mutterings about sabotage by Apple—especially since the Great BlackBerry Outage of 2011, which wiped out email, texting and browsing services around the world, happened last year in the same week that Apple launched its iPhone 4S. The problem appears to have been fixed within a few hours, which means RIM probably won’t be offering free downloads of Bubble Bash this time around. [h/t Globe and Mail]