Following this morning's BlackBerry email outage which has now been fixed, the smartphone maker, Research In Motion Ltd. released better than expected third quarter earnings after the closing bell.

The Waterloo, Ontario-based company reported a 59 percent in earnings, compared to the same quarter a year ago. For the period that ended November 30, the company reported earnings of $628.4 million, or $1.10 per share, compared to $396.3 million, or 69 cents a share, for the fiscal third quarter last year.

Analysts had expected the company to report earnings of $1.04 per share on revenue around $3.78 billion.

The company said it shipped 10.1 million smartphones during the quarter. Co-Chief Executive Jim Balsillie said in a statement that company is experiencing a great start to the holiday buying season.

The company said it added about 4.4 million net new BlackBerry subscriber accounts in the third quarter, bringing the total BlackBerry subscriber account base to about 36 million at quarter-end. Analysts were expecting 4.1 million new subscribers with shipments of 9.5 million.

Earlier Thursday before the company reported results, BlackBerry users across North America were unable to send or receive emails. The company later released a statement, saying that the error has been resolved but some clients may continue to experience delays with their emails. The issue did not affected phone service, browsing and PIN-to-PIN messaging services.

RIM is continuing to investigate the cause of the issue and apologizes for any inconvenience, the company said in a statement.

In late trading, Research in motion shares jumped up $7.81, or 12.3 percent, to $71.27 on the Nasdaq.

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