Microsoft Hit By Another Outage, Company Cites Cyber-Attack as Trigger

Tech giant Microsoft announced that it has resolved a global outage that impacted its products, including Outlook email and Minecraft. 

As per the preliminary investigations done by the company, the outage was reportedly due to a cyber attack and inadequate defense against it. After the widespread outage, Microsoft issued an apology to its users about the same. 

Taking to X (formerly Twitter), the company had said, “Our experts are currently investigating the situation in order to resolve it as soon as possible.” The issue lasted for almost ten hours, with many users complaining about the outage. 

Read: IT Outage: Microsoft Deploys Hundreds of Engineers, Experts to Restore Services

The incident was initially caused by a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack that activated Microsoft's DDoS protection measures, as per an update on the Microsoft website. However, preliminary investigations indicate a flaw in the implementation of the company's defenses exacerbated the attack's effects instead of mitigating them. 

The company updated on its website, “We will publish a preliminary post-incident review (PIR) within approximately 72 hours to share more details on what happened and how we responded. After our internal retrospective is completed, generally within 14 days, we will publish a Final Post Incident Review with any additional details and learnings.” 

As per the BBC, several services that rely on Microsoft, including Cambridge Water (a water supply company in England), Tribunal Services in England, were affected by the services. 

Amid the outrage, users took to X to share their experience about the outrage. One user wrote, “Another day, another technology outage. It’s @Microsoft’s turn this time. Cue the outrage.” 

This incident comes just a few days after the global Crowdstrike chaos that led to worldwide disruption in the functioning of airlines, offices, and several other things. The problem began following a faulty software update from cybersecurity company CrowdStrike. Following the incident, the company mentioned that this affected 8.5 million Windows devices. 

David Weston, Vice President, Enterprise and OS Security, said in a blog post, “On July 18, CrowdStrike, an independent cybersecurity company, released a software update that began impacting IT systems globally. Although this was not a Microsoft incident, given it impacts our ecosystem, we want to provide an update on the steps we’ve taken with CrowdStrike and others to remediate and support our customers.”