Microsoft said on Thursday that efforts to resolve a major global outage affecting Outlook were not progressing as expected, prompting the technology giant to seek alternative solutions as users around the world struggled to access its services.

The hours-long disruption, which the company attributed to “elevated load” on its infrastructure, affected email services and other products, including Teams and the artificial intelligence assistant Copilot.

The impact was felt globally, with businesses, government institutions, and individual users reporting difficulties communicating through Outlook.

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

“We’re identifying alternate workstreams that can be applied to increase capacity,” the technology giant added, without indicating when full service would be restored.

The disruption spread globally within an hour, affecting Microsoft products in 74 countries and territories, according to outage-tracking platform Downdetector.

A map published by Downdetector on X showed that users across the Americas and parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa had been affected.

New Zealand was among the affected countries. Its Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade issued a notice stating that its “ability to receive emails has been affected by the global Microsoft outage. This also impacts all New Zealand Embassies, Consulates and Representative Offices around the world.”

Microsoft initially said it was investigating reports of disruptions “in the Americas” but later confirmed that the problem appeared to affect “Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in any region”.

Microsoft 365 is the company’s cloud-based subscription service, which includes popular applications such as Outlook and Teams.

“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 in another post on X.

“We’re aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact,” it added.

Downdetector, which monitors reports of online service disruptions, recorded a sharp decline in user complaints around 04:50 GMT in Washington and Hong Kong.

Thousands of users also reported difficulties accessing Teams and Copilot, according to the platform.

As the outage continued for several hours, Microsoft issued a series of updates on X, outlining its ongoing efforts to restore full service.

In an update shortly after 6 pm Eastern Time (23:00 GMT), the company said it was “observing limited recovery” as it attempted to redirect user traffic away from affected servers.

“As capacity is restored, users may experience a gradual recovery as their clients reconnect,” Microsoft added.