BlackBerry users are facing a hard time with their phone's network.

Per reports, more than a thousand people around Ireland and the UK were victims of a massive BlackBerry network breakdown after Vodafone's BlackBerry service went down.

The problem, which was resolved by Friday at lunchtime, saw BlackBerry users on the Vodafone network unable to access the Internet all morning after the Vodafone router came into a major error, once again questioning the company's reputation as far as reliability is concerned.

However, the service was gradually restored after an hour-long outage hit the email and instant-messaging services across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. A Vodafone spokesman said some BlackBerry customers experienced issues with their data services across the region.

"Services are in the process of being restored and we continue to monitor the situation closely," he said.

"BlackBerry users couldn't access emails and instant messaging on Vodafone's U.K. network for around five hours. Voice and text services weren't affected by the outage, the spokesman said," a WSJ report states.

The new issue with the Vodafone service is pretty similar to problems with O2's service last year, and is the latest outage to hit BlackBerry since its system collapsed across the world for several days in October 2011.

"Unlike other smartphones, BlackBerry relies on its own infrastructure to access online services. For example, emails are routed through the company's own servers rather than a mobile network," Independent.ie states. "While this was originally a major selling point for the company, it has created unwelcome headlines for the company in recent years."

The WSJ states that similar to former market leader Nokia, RIM is struggling to regain market share it lost to smartphones like the Apple iPhone and Google powered Android smartphones. "RIM lost about one million BlackBerry subscribers in the three months to Dec. 1, the first time that RIM's overall customer base has fallen. It now has a total of 79 million global subscribers."

BlackBerry's parent company, Research In Motion later said in a short statement that "all BlackBerry services are operating normally" although he accepted that "a wider Vodafone service issue" was hitting some of its BlackBerry customers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

"We are supporting Vodafone's efforts to resolve the issue as soon as possible."