Microsoft assures users Hotmail, Outlook services back up after outage

Key highlights:

• "Everything is up and running," Microsoft said in a blog post on its Office 365 security site
• Microsoft Corp's free email services Outlook.com and Hotmail suffered an outage across Europe on Monday
• The outage began at 0720 GMT and continued to affect users across the region for more than 12 hours

Microsoft Corp said its free email services Outlook.com and Hotmail, which suffered an outage across Europe on Monday, were back up.

"Everything is up and running," Microsoft said in a blog post on its Office 365 security site.

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The outage began at 0720 GMT and continued to affect users across the region for more than 12 hours, preventing them from sending and receiving emails, Microsoft said in a blog post on its Office 365 security site.

Microsoft said the issue involved part of the company's internet traffic load-balancing system which was gobbling up server capacity despite no apparent increase in user traffic.

Outage reports were concentrated in Western Europe and Britain, according to DownDetector.co.uk, an outage reporting site. No other major Microsoft online services appeared to be affected.