MICROSOFT has revealed the global outage affecting Azure and Outlook services yesterday was caused by a cyberattack.
The tech giant was hit by a second outage affecting a handful of Microsoft services, as well as videogame Minecraft, less than two weeks after a major IT meltdown caused chaos across the world.
The most recent disruption affected airports, such as Heathrow, the UK’s largest travel hub, and some banks.
Microsoft deployed multiple worldwide engineering teams to investigate the issue.
A preliminary investigation shows the outage was caused by a cyberattack that cyber defences failed to combat.
In a statement on the Azure server status site, Microsoft said “Initial investigations suggest that an error in the implementation of our defenses amplified the impact of the attack rather than mitigating it.”
The hack was a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack.
The company issues an apology for the incident, which lasted about 10 hours, and impacted thousands of users.
With crucial services affected, including Outlook, Azure and Microsoft 365, some people complained on social media that they couldn’t do their jobs.
Microsoft said it will publish a review of the incident in three days.
A DDoS stands for a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack.
It is a malicious attempt to disrupt a targeted website, service or network by overwhelming it with internet traffic.
A network is essentially flooded with so much information that it can’t bear the weight, and it crashes.
A successful DDoS attack will make parts, or all, of a website, service or network unavailable.
It comes a little over a week since Microsoft last made headlines for a worldwide mega-outage due to a faulty CrowdStrike update.
The outage affected hundreds of services on an unprecedented scale.
It grounded flights, disrupted emergency services, halted hospital appointments, newsrooms, television networks and businesses worldwide.
The so-called Microsoft meltdown, which lasted about 20 hours, is reported to have cost the economy an estimated $24billion – or £18billion.
One expert told The Sun it was the closest the world has ever come to the long-fabled “digital apocalypse”.
