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

Axar.az reports, citing AFP, the hours-long disruption, which Microsoft attributed to "elevated load" on its infrastructure, has hit email as well as products such as Teams and the AI assistant Copilot.

The impact of the outage has been 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.

"We're identifying alternate workstreams that can be applied to increase capacity," the tech giant added, without saying when service was expected to be fully restored.

The disruption went global within an hour, knocking out Microsoft products in 74 countries and territories, outage tracker Downdetector reported.

A map posted by Downdetector on X showed the outage affected users across the Americas and parts of Europe, Asia and Africa.