Microsoft Outlook was hit by a major outage on Thursday evening and into the night leading into Friday across several regions, including the United States and Australia, affecting tens of thousands of users.

That is according to the Agence France-Presse news agency, Ritzau reports.

Microsoft said it was working urgently to limit the extent of the outage.

Outlook is Microsoft’s email service.

According to Microsoft, the problems are caused by what the company describes as an ’elevated load’ on its infrastructure.

Australia’s intelligence service and federal police are among the affected organizations, they said, according to AFP.

The country’s home affairs minister, Tony Burke, said that Microsoft had told him the company does not believe the outage was caused by a cyberattack.

Microsoft’s website shows that other Microsoft products are also affected, including Teams, SharePoint, Planner, To Do and a number of others.

The company initially said it was investigating reports of outages in North and South America.

Later, it said that it had »confirmed that the issue may affect access to Microsoft 365 services for users in all regions.«

Microsoft 365 is a cloud subscription service in which files and programs are stored online rather than on the user’s own computer. Popular programs such as Outlook and Teams are part of the service.

According to the monitoring service Downdetector, nearly 130,000 users on the U.S. East Coast reported problems with Outlook shortly after 1 p.m. local time – 7 p.m. in Denmark.

The number of error reports has since fallen to around 50,000 users, AFP reported.

Shortly before midnight, Microsoft’s website said that it had begun restoring connections to servers.

»We have begun putting some of the affected servers back into operation, and they have so far remained stable. We have also rerouted traffic and connections through alternative paths where possible, and we have observed limited recovery in some regions«.

»As capacity is restored, users may experience gradual relief as their applications reconnect«, it said.