Microsoft Outlook suffered a major outage on Thursday, leaving tens of thousands of users unable to access their emails, as the company worked to restore services and limit the disruption.According to outage tracker Downdetector, nearly 130,000 users reported problems with Outlook shortly after 1 pm Eastern Time (1800 GMT). The number of reports subsequently declined, with around 60,000 users still reporting issues as of 3 pm Eastern Time (2000 GMT).Microsoft initially said it was investigating reports of service disruptions in the Americas but later confirmed that the issue could affect Microsoft 365 connectivity across all regions.Microsoft 365 is the company's cloud-based subscription service that includes applications such as Outlook and Teams.In an update on X, Microsoft said it had identified elevated load across parts of its infrastructure in multiple regions as a likely cause of the connectivity problems.

"We've determined a portion of infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors," the company said.

"We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact," it added.Microsoft said it had paused all deployments, redirected additional traffic away from the affected infrastructure and begun restarting impacted servers to restore services.Thousands of users also reported difficulties accessing Microsoft Teams. Earlier on Thursday, the company said it had “successfully restored” issues affecting Teams in North America, although some users continued to report connectivity problems.