Microsoft Azure Outage Amplified by Fumbled DDoS Defense Strategy Implementation

Microsoft confirmed today that a nine-hour outage on Tuesday, which took down and disrupted multiple Microsoft 365 and Azure services worldwide, was triggered by a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. The company has yet to link it to a specific threat actor. "While the initial trigger event was a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack... initial investigations suggest that an error in the implementation of our defenses amplified the impact of the attack rather than mitigating it," said an update on the website of the Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform.

It comes less than two weeks after a major global outage left around 8.5 million computers using Microsoft systems inaccessible, impacting healthcare and travel, after a flawed software update by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.

Estimated Cost

No cost values disclosed.

Threat Source

Impacts

IT