Microsoft Faces Major Outage Due to DDoS Attack

On Tuesday, Microsoft had a major outage that hit several of its services, including Microsoft 365 and Azure. This disruption lasted for nearly eight hours and was initially triggered by a DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack.

According to Microsoft, their DDoS protection mechanisms were activated because of the attack. However, the situation worsened due to an error in how their response teams handled the incident. The company stated that this misstep actually amplified the effects of the attack instead of reducing them.

The outage didn’t just affect the Azure portal; it also disrupted several Azure services like Application Insights, App Services, IoT Central, Log Search Alerts, and Azure Policy. Additionally, some services in Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Purview were also impacted.

This incident comes on the heels of another major outage less than two weeks ago, which stemmed from a faulty update from CrowdStrike that affected millions of Windows devices and impacted sectors like air travel and healthcare.

On the same day, AWS was also dealing with its own significant outage, which affected services like Ring and Alexa, as well as Whole Foods supermarkets. This back-to-back disruption in major tech services has raised eyebrows among users and industry experts alike.

The pattern of DDoS attacks has been reminiscent of earlier issues this year, particularly a series of outages Microsoft faced in June that were also caused by similar attacks.