Microsoft’s free email services Outlook.com and Hotmail have reportedly suffered an outage across Europe on Monday, according to reports.
According to Reuters, the outage has prevented users from sending and receiving emails for 12 hours.
The outage began at 0720 GMT and continued to affect users across the region, Microsoft said in a blog post on its Office 365 security site.
Outage reports were concentrated in Western Europe and Britain. No other major Microsoft online services appeared to be affected.
Microsoft said it was working to resolve the glitch and would issue an update on the status of its services.
“We’re continuing to investigate to determine the source of the issue and to identify service recovery steps,” the firm said.
The company said that the issue was due to the company’s internet traffic load-balancing system which was gobbling up server capacity despite no apparent increase in user traffic.
