United States: The global outage that affected Microsoft products, such as the email service Outlook and the video game Minecraft, has been fixed, according to a statement from the computer behemoth.
The company added that initial findings indicate that a cyberattack and inadequate defences against it were the root cause of the outage.
The incident, which lasted for about ten hours and led thousands of users to report problems with Microsoft services, was already apologized for by the firm.
It occurred less than two weeks after a critical worldwide outage caused by a faulty software upgrade by cybersecurity company CrowdStrike rendered 8.5 million machines running Microsoft systems inoperable, affecting healthcare and travel.
“While the initial trigger event was a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack… initial investigations suggest that an error in the implementation of our defences amplified the impact of the attack rather than mitigating it,” said an update on the website of the Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform.
DDoS attacks work by flooding a website or online service with internet traffic in an attempt to throw it offline, or otherwise make it inaccessible.
“It seems slightly surreal that we’re experiencing another serious outage of online services from Microsoft. You’d expect Microsoft’s network infrastructure to be bomb-proof,” said computer security expert Professor Alan Woodward.
Before, The tech behemoth’s service status page posted an alert stating that the outage had an impact on Microsoft 365, which comprises programs like Microsoft Office and Outlook, as well as Microsoft Azure, the cloud computing infrastructure that powers many of its services.
It also mentioned Entra and Intune, two of its cloud platforms, as being affected. Microsoft reported that a remedy for the issue “shows improvement” and that it will keep an eye on the matter “to ensure full recovery.” The statement on X, the previous Twitter platform, read, “We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience.”
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