Thousands of users of Microsoft Outlook, a software system within the Microsoft 365 package, have been hit by a blackout of the system that appears to have included Bermuda as well as North America.

Reuters reported that Microsoft 365, Outlook ​and Teams had gone down for thousands of US users, according to the website Downdetector.com.

The news service said there were “more than ‌130,000 incidents of people reporting issues ⁠with Outlook” just before 1.30pm Eastern time (2.30pm in Bermuda).

As of 8pm, the number of reports had fallen below 30,000.

Microsoft earlier said ‌it ⁠had fixed a Teams disruption affecting users ​in North America and that ​the impact had been “fully resolved”.

However, it warned that Microsoft 365 ​service connectivity may be affected for users in other regions.

In a post on social media, the Bermuda Government confirmed that the issues may cause difficulties to some departments.

The post stated: “Some government departments and public officers may experience difficulties accessing Outlook or their e-mail accounts, potentially affecting e-mail communications and response times.

“The Department of Information and Digital Technologies is monitoring the situation and will provide further updates as information becomes available.

“We apologise for any inconvenience and thank the public for their patience and understanding.”

Reuters highlighted more ‌than 46,000 ​user reports of problems with Microsoft 365, and about 3,000 reports ‌of users having ⁠trouble accessing Teams on the Downdetector site.

Microsoft has issued a statement, explaining that the problem began in the US but can now affect users in any region.

At 3.30pm, the company said it was “aggressively” pursuing ways to reduce the impact.

The company said: “We’ve determined that the elevated load isn't driven by an overall increase in traffic, but by a large number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable, which is shifting load onto the remaining infrastructure.

“We’re investigating what’s causing these servers to become unavailable while we work to safely return them to service.”

At 8pm, the company provided an update stating: “While the servers we've returned to service initially remain healthy, we've observed that they can become unresponsive again once they begin receiving traffic.”

Microsoft said that it was still working to address the issue, but were temporarily limiting the types of traffic able to reach the affected infrastructure in specific locations to determine what is contributing to the issue.

The company added: “Additionally, we're rebuilding a subset of affected servers using a previous software configuration to validate whether this prevents them from becoming unresponsive, and we'll expand this approach to additional servers if we observe positive results.”

UPDATE: this article has been amended with the latest information from Microsoft and the Government of Bermuda, and will be developed as more information becomes available