A disruption to the state of Minnesota's Microsoft Exchange e-mail service left about 50,000 state and local government employees unable to receive incoming messages to their public accounts for much of Wednesday.

The service disruption began about 1 a.m. Wednesday, according to the state's information technology office, MN.IT Services. The e-mail disruption continued through the end of the workday, but service was restored later Wednesday night.

The agency said no security breach was involved, and Assistant Commissioner Jenna Covey said the problem was on Microsoft's end.

The outage affected about 50,000 e-mail accounts at state executive branch agencies, along with those belonging to employees at some cities, counties and school districts. Blaine and Champlin employees were affected, along with employees of Washington and Stearns counties.

Those employees were able to send e-mails, and send and receive e-mails within the internal network, but were not getting e-mails from outside the network.

The agency said that any e-mails that were sent to a Minnesota state agency, board or commission between the hours of 1 a.m. and 8:15 p.m. Wednesday will need to be resent.