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Research In Motion have denied that a hacking attempt is the reason for the outages that have blighted Blackberry owners for the last four days.

Users in Europe, the Middle East and Africa have been without email, internet and BBM sporadically since October 10.

The problems have now spread to the US and Canada in what is becoming an ever increasing crisis for RIM.

The Canadian company have issued an update on their official website that reads: "In Europe, Middle East, India and Africa, we are seeing a significant increase in service levels.

"Service levels are also progressing well in the US, Canada and Latin America and we are seeing increased traffic throughput on most services, although there are still some delays and services levels may still vary amongst customers.

"Our global teams are continuing to work as quickly as possible to restore full and consistent service across all regions."

The chief information officer for RIM, Robin Bienfait, apologised for the ongoing issues, saying: "You've depended on us for reliable, real-time communications, and right now we're letting you down. We are taking this very seriously and have people around the world working around the clock to address this situation.

"We believe we understand why this happened and we are working to restore normal service levels in all markets as quickly as we can."

RIM have tentatively assured users that all services will be fully restored by the weekend.

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