Struggling to check your email today? .

Outlook is experiencing an outage globally, leaving users unable to send or receive emails. The Microsoft-owned email service is one of the most widely used on the planet, with an estimated 400 million active users worldwide. However, an unknown issue has left Outlook users in the UK unable to refresh their inbox.

Microsoft has confirmed the widespread problem. In an update to its server status dashboard, it writes: "Users may be unable to access their mailbox using any connection methods."

According to Microsoft, the Outlook experiences most likely impacted by the ongoing problems include:

According to the independent web service Down Detector, which tracks outages based on reports across social media, those impacted by the outage are seeing messages telling them they have been unable to connect to a server, and are struggling to connect to the service from a range of devices.

Down Detector UK has recorded a dramatic spike in reported issues with the service across the UK. There doesn't seem to be a single platform that's more impact than any other