ST. PAUL — Email service for about 50,000 public employees is down.

Minnesota information technology officials say the outage began at 1 a.m. Wednesday and wasn’t caused by an outside security breach. MN.IT Services Assistant Commissioner Jenna Covey says it was caused by a Microsoft change to the state’s email server.

The error is blocking emails from the public to employees from the state and some city and county accounts. Any messages will need to be resent after the issue is resolved.

Covey says the state hopes to resume normal email service Wednesday morning.