Microsoft announced it has solved the unspecified technical glitch that affected its Live services on Tuesday. 

On early Tuesday, the users from the U.S. and Europe had been reporting that Windows Live Mail and other services related to Windows Live ID were down.

Shortly after the first reports have emerged a Microsoft spokesperson announced in a press statement that the problem was related to Windows Live ID and the company is on its way to solve the issue.

"The issue is purely impacting the login process for customers and largely does not impact customers who were already logged in," said Microsoft spokeswoman Samantha McManus in a statement. "We have made significant progress in decreasing the number of customers currently affected since initial reports, but the issue has not yet been completely resolved."

However it remains unknown how many users were affected by the outage. Microsoft said only that the users who were already logged in to the services that are using Windows Live ID weren’t affected. Though, according to users’ reports it seems like those who are already signed in to Windows Live ID were unable to log out.

According to Todd Bishop from SeattlePi.com, Microsoft explained that the issue “impacted the majority of customer log-in attempts worldwide but as we investigated the percentage was decreased to less than 30% of log-in attempts”. Windows Live ID is based on Passport technology and it used to provide one-stop access to all service that require a Microsoft login. According to Microsoft, there are 400 million Windows Live ID users worldwide, while Windows Live Mail has a installed-base of 250 million users.

Later on Tuesday Samantha McManus issued another statement, saying that the issue was solved.

"Earlier today, an issue began that has caused some consumers worldwide to experience difficulty logging in to their Windows Live ID accounts," she said. "This issue has since been resolved and normal operations have been restored to all customers."