Microsoft services, including Outlook and Minecraft, hit by global outage due to cyber attack
Microsoft cyber attack: Microsoft products, including the email service Outlook and the popular video game Minecraft, experienced another global outage. In a company update, Microsoft stated that the issue has been resolved and preliminary investigations indicate that a cyber-attack triggered the outage. The company's defenses failed to adequately protect against the attack.
The outage lasted nearly 10 hours, affecting thousands of users who reported problems with various Microsoft services. This incident occurred less than two weeks after another major global outage that impacted approximately 8.5 million computers running Microsoft systems. That previous outage, which disrupted healthcare and travel sectors, was caused by a flawed software update from the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.
An update on the Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform's website said, “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.”
Microsoft has implemented a fix for the problem, which has shown improvement. The tech giant is monitoring the situation to ensure a complete recovery. In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Microsoft expressed, “We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience.” The outage affected services reliant on Microsoft's platforms, causing significant disruptions.
- With inputs from agencies
