If your email is down today, you're not alone - millions of Microsoft Exchange users across the world have been without email since late morning.

But unfortunately there's not likely to be anything your office IT team can do about it.

That's because Microsoft Office 365, the cloud service that powers Outlook as well as newer versions of Word, Excel and Powerpoint, is suffering an outage across Europe and the Asia-Pacific region.

In a standard Twitter response sent out to users reporting problems, Microsoft said: "We're investigating reports of our dear customers having issues with logging in to Microsoft Account/Office 365. Our Network Operations Center Engineers are currently working to resolve this. More details will be provided shortly."

Perhaps not coincidentally, the outage comes mere hours afterMicrosoft announced it was rolling out changes to Office 365 that would "help further protect individuals and families from online threats."

While the problem remains unresolved, users across the UK, Europe and Asia have now been without access to email for several hours.

But at least some people can see the funny side: