A service outage hit thousands of Microsoft Outlook users tonight with many unable to access their email accounts.

Scores of users have reported issues logging in to their Outlook and Hotmail email accounts, with the technology giant confirming it is suffering from connection problems.

The company’s service health website carries a message which reads: “We’ve identified that a subset of infrastructure was unable to process requests as expected, which caused general service availability to drop unexpectedly.

“We’ve redirected requests to alternate infrastructure to restore service, and we’re monitoring the environment while connectivity recovers. Additionally, we’re investigating an issue in which users are unable to send email messages.”

According to service monitoring site Downdetector.co.uk, the platform has been experiencing issues since this around 9am, with the UK among the worst affected areas.

“Intermittent connectivity is affecting customers in some European countries, which we are working to resolve as soon as possible,” a Microsoft spokeswoman said.