Microsoft has issued a statement apologizing for a recent IT outage, which they attribute to a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) cyber attack on the infrastructure managed by Microsoft Azure Cloud.
Under the leadership of Satya Nadella, and amid a surge of media attention on his daughter Tara Nadella, the company revealed that the outage resulted from a malfunction in the automated protection system of their Microsoft Threat Intelligence software. This failure compromised the protection of IT assets against DDoS attacks.
The outage impacted a wide range of services, including Azure users, Minecraft players, and customers of Starbucks Corp, Cambridge Water, and NatWest. The disruption lasted for at least six hours, during which affected devices displayed error messages on Tuesday.
Down Detector reported that the issue began at 7 AM New York time and persisted until 5 PM. Some services, such as MS Office 365 and other Outlook applications, remained unavailable until 9 PM.
This incident follows a previous IT meltdown earlier this month, when a software update from CrowdStrike caused widespread issues, affecting around 8.5 million devices running Windows 10 and 11. CrowdStrike later clarified that the outage was due to a software bug, not a cyber attack.
Microsoft’s recent admission of the DDoS attack on its Azure cloud platform has led to a decline in its stock value, with shares falling over 2.9% in Tuesday’s trading. The company assures that they are working to resolve the disruption and restore services fully.
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