A flaw in two recently released versions of BlackBerry Messenger appears to be the cause of Tuesday night's BlackBerry e-mail outage, Research in Motion said in a Wednesday morning statement.

"Root cause is currently under review, but based on preliminary analysis, it currently appears that the issue stemmed from a flaw in two recently released versions of BlackBerry Messenger (versions 5.0.0.55 and 5.0.0.56) that caused an unanticipated database issue within the BlackBerry infrastructure," according to RIM. "RIM has taken corrective action to restore service."

RIM released a new version of BlackBerry Messenger (version 5.0.0.57) and encouraged any user who upgraded their Messenger since Dec. 14 to download the lastest version.

"RIM continues to monitor its systems to maintain normal service levels and apologizes for any inconvenience to customers," the company said.

Late last night, RIM confirmed that its BlackBerry service had suffered its second e-mail outage in five days. Users were unable to receive messages or chat via BlackBerry Messenger, though calling and texting functions were unaffected.

"A service interruption occurred Tuesday that affected BlackBerry customers in the Americas," RIM said Wednesday. "Message delivery was delayed or intermittent during the service interruption."

A similar problem occured on Thursday, when users were once again not able to receive e-mails on their devices.