Microsoft has fixed a global outage that affected its products, including the Outlook email service and the Minecraft game. The company explained that the problem was due to a cyber-attack and a failure to protect against it.
Microsoft apologized for the outage, which lasted nearly 10 hours and caused thousands of users to experience issues. This incident happened less than two weeks after another major outage, which made about 8.5 million computers using Microsoft systems unreachable, impacting sectors like healthcare and travel.
That earlier problem was caused by a faulty software update from the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike.
Microsoft Faces Major Outage Due to DDoS Attack
Microsoft Azure’s website reported that a recent major outage was caused by a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack. This kind of attack overwhelms a website or service with too much traffic, making it go offline or hard to access.
The company found that a mistake in their defense system made the attack’s impact worse instead of preventing it.
Computer security expert Professor Alan Woodward found it surprising that Microsoft experienced another serious outage, especially since their network is expected to be very secure.
The outage affected several services, including Microsoft Azure, which supports many Microsoft products, and Microsoft 365, which includes Microsoft Office and Outlook. It also impacted their cloud systems Intune and Entra.
Microsoft said they have fixed the issue and are seeing improvements. They will keep monitoring the situation to make sure everything is fully restored and apologized for the inconvenience in a post on X (formerly Twitter).
Who Is Affected by the Outage?
The outage has also impacted other services that depend on Microsoft’s platforms. For example, Cambridge Water has reported issues with its website affecting services like MyAccount and PayNow due to problems with Microsoft Azure.
The HM Courts and Tribunals Service, which handles criminal, civil, and family courts in England and Wales, noted problems with several of its online services. Some NatWest customers also had trouble accessing the bank’s Webpages.
A NatWest spokesperson said the issue was linked to Microsoft’s problems and has now been resolved. They apologized for any inconvenience caused.
Additionally, Dutch football team FC Twente announced that their ticketing website and club app were down because of the outage.
These issues with Microsoft came just hours before the company was set to release its latest financial update.
