BlackBerry owners in parts of Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and South America have been suffering through service outages for the past few days that have left them unable to receive emails and BBMs, and now it looks like the problem has spread to some users in the U.S. and Canada as well. RIM has yet to issue any kind of statement about a problem in the States, but several of the BlackBerry faithful are seeing delayed messages and some are even reporting that they're "completely in the dark."

We've seen service outages hit BlackBerry devices in the U.S. a few times in the past, but usually those issues are ironed out by RIM in a timely manner. This latest problem is one of the most severe in recent memory, though, because it not only has last for several days but also because it's affecting customers throughout the world. Plus, with the iPhone 4S coming on Friday and the Nexus Prime/Galaxy Nexus just around the corner, this outage probably couldn't have come at a worse time for RIM. Are any of you BlackBerry users out there experiencing service problems?

UPDATE: RIM has posted a statement on its website confirming that some users in the Americas are having service issues today. There's no mention of when service is expected to be restored, but RIM promises that it's "working to resolve the situation as quickly as possible." We'll keep you posted.

Via CrackBerry, Engadget, CNN, RIM