North and South American users of Research in Motion Ltd's BlackBerry smartphone suffered widespread delays in message services on Tuesday, just a week after another outage struck the popular corporate network.

Customers and analysts had raised concerns about network stability after a short-lived outage on December 17 -- the same day the Canadian company reported quarterly results.

RIM said in a statement that some BlackBerry customers in the Americas are experiencing delays in message delivery. Technical teams are actively working to resolve the issue for those impacted.

Canada-based RIM's line of BlackBerry products is one of the world's most popular smartphone brands, and is used widely among corporations as an email and communications device.

BlackBerry users on Tuesday reported problems on the wireless networks of AT&T Inc, Verizon Communications Inc, Sprint Nextel Corp and T-Mobile USA, a unit of Deutsche Telekom.

BlackBerry customers were also hit by email delays on the morning of December 17, though that outage appeared to affect mainly individual and small-business users, rather than large corporations.

After RIM had major outages in February 2008 and April 2007, customers raised concerns over service stability. The company had pledged to improve reliability to avoid future crashes, but had not disclosed details.

Shares in Research in Motion closed 3.6 percent lower at $67.22 on the Nasdaq, and at C$71.21 in Toronto. They were holding steady in after-hours trade on Nasdaq.

(Reporting by Ernest Scheyder and Gabriel Madway; Editing by Ian Geoghegan.)

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