WASHINGTON: Microsoft said on Thursday that efforts to repair a major Outlook outage were not going as expected, and that the company was seeking alternative solutions as users around the world were left without access to its crucial services.

The hours-long disruption, which Microsoft attributed to “elevated load” on its infrastructure, affected email services as well as products such as Teams and the AI assistant Copilot.

The impact of the outage was felt globally, with users ranging from companies to governments reporting that they were unable to communicate via Outlook.

“We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they’re not taking as expected,” Microsoft said on X.