Microsoft Outlook suffered a major outage around the world on Thursday, with tens of thousands of users struggling to access their email as the company said it was working “aggressively” to reduce the impact. The outage, which Microsoft attributed to a “high load” on its infrastructure, lasted through much of the workday in the United States and also affected other company products, such as Teams and the Copilot AI assistant. The outage went global within an hour, knocking out Microsoft products in 74 countries and territories, outage tracker Downdetector reported. A map published by Downdetector on X showed that the outage affected users in the Americas and parts of Europe, Asia and Africa. Microsoft initially said it was investigating reports of outages “in the Americas,” but later confirmed that the issue apparently affected “Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in any region.” Microsoft 365 is the company’s cloud-based subscription service that includes popular apps like Outlook and Teams. “We have determined that a portion of the infrastructure is experiencing high load in multiple regions, which is likely contributing to connectivity errors,” the company wrote in X. “We are aggressively pursuing all avenues to reduce the impact,” it added. “We have paused all deployments, are moving additional traffic off the affected infrastructure, and are rebooting the affected servers back up and running.” In the United States, around 130,000 users reported problems with Outlook shortly after 1 pm Eastern Time (1800 GMT), according to Downdetector. Reports of outages have since decreased, with around 37,000 users reporting experiencing problems with Outlook as of 6 pm Eastern Time (2300 GMT). Thousands of users also reported problems with Teams and Copilot, according to Downdetector. As the outage continued for hours, Microsoft released a series of updates to X, detailing ongoing but unsuccessful efforts to restore full service. In an update shortly after 6 p.m. ET, Microsoft said it was “seeing limited recovery” as it attempted to divert user traffic away from the affected servers. “As capacity is restored, users will be able to experience a gradual recovery as their customers come back online,” the company added. (FRANCE 24 with AFP)