[Global] Second Microsoft outage a fortnight after global IT chaos

A second global outage on July 30, affecting Microsoft products including its email service Outlook and the video game Minecraft, has been resolved, BBC News reports.

Microsoft announced that it had fixed the issues in a status update. It stated that preliminary investigations had shown the cause of the outage was a cyberattack and a failure to properly defend against it.

Earlier in the day, the tech giant apologised for the incident, which reportedly lasted almost 10 hours and saw thousands of users logging issues with Microsoft services.

"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," the update on the website of the Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform said.

DDoS attacks flood a website or online service with internet traffic to drive it offline or make it inaccessible.

The new problems came in the wake of a major global outage a fortnight before that left around 8.5 million computers unable to access Microsoft systems. 

The outage impacted healthcare and travel, following a flawed software update by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.

"It seems slightly surreal that we’re experiencing another serious outage of online services from Microsoft," computer security expert Professor Alan Woodward told BBC News.

“You’d expect Microsoft’s network infrastructure to be bomb-proof."

An alert on Microsoft's service status website stated that the outage had impacted Microsoft Azure - the cloud computing platform behind many of its services - and Microsoft 365, which includes Microsoft Office and Outlook.

The alert also reportedly listed its cloud systems Intune and Entra as other affected services. Microsoft said it had implemented a fix for the problem which "shows improvement" and that it would monitor the situation "to ensure full recovery".

"We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience," Microsoft said in a Tweet.

Source: BBC News

(Links and quotes via original reporting)

A second global outage on July 30, affecting Microsoft products including its email service Outlook and the video game Minecraft, has been resolved, BBC News reports.

Microsoft announced that it had fixed the issues in a status update. It stated that preliminary investigations had shown the cause of the outage was a cyberattack and a failure to properly defend against it.

Earlier in the day, the tech giant apologised for the incident, which reportedly lasted almost 10 hours and saw thousands of users logging issues with Microsoft services.

"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," the update on the website of the Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform said.

DDoS attacks flood a website or online service with internet traffic to drive it offline or make it inaccessible.

The new problems came in the wake of a major global outage a fortnight before that left around 8.5 million computers unable to access Microsoft systems. 

The outage impacted healthcare and travel, following a flawed software update by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.

"It seems slightly surreal that we’re experiencing another serious outage of online services from Microsoft," computer security expert Professor Alan Woodward told BBC News.

“You’d expect Microsoft’s network infrastructure to be bomb-proof."

An alert on Microsoft's service status website stated that the outage had impacted Microsoft Azure - the cloud computing platform behind many of its services - and Microsoft 365, which includes Microsoft Office and Outlook.

The alert also reportedly listed its cloud systems Intune and Entra as other affected services. Microsoft said it had implemented a fix for the problem which "shows improvement" and that it would monitor the situation "to ensure full recovery".

"We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience," Microsoft said in a Tweet.

Source: BBC News

(Links and quotes via original reporting)