Microsoft Azure, Outlook, Other Services Face Disruptions In Second Outage Within Fortnight; What Company Said

Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365 and other services like Outlook and the game Minecraft witnessed a massive outage globally. The outage lasted for over 10 hours after which Microsoft announced that the services were restored successfully. While the exact reason and detailed analysis will be revealed in a few days, the media reports state that the Microsoft outage was due to a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack, a kind of malicious attack.

Microsoft Outage: What Happened

The global outage impacted Azure App Services, Application Insights, Azure IoT Central, Azure Log Search Alerts, Azure Policy, the Azure interface, and a subset of Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Purview services from 5.30 PM IST to 1.20 AM. While the specific reason for the Microsoft outage is unknown, rumours indicate that it was caused by a DDoS attack that activated the protection system.

Microsoft Azure Outage: After Global Disruption, Microsoft 365, Cloud Services Improving As Company Implements 'Mitigation' Measures

However, the reports also state that an error in the deployment of protection amplified the attack that caused the Microsoft outage.

When Will Microsoft Reveal The Reason Behind the Outage:

Microsoft has stated that it will be publishing a Preliminary Post Incident Review (PIR) within approximately 72 hours which will offer more details about the outage. After PIR, the tech giant will publish a Final Post Incident Review with detailed information and learnings in the next 14 days. It will be available at https://aka.ms/AzurePIRs.

Windows CrowdStrike Issue: CERT-In Warns Of 'Phishing Campaign' Targeting Affected Online Users; How To Be Safe

Meanwhile, this is the second massive outage within two weeks. The previous Microsoft outage which caused Blue Screen of Death errors on over 8.5 million devices, affected aviation, telecom, hospitality and corporates. The reason behind the outage was the CrowdStrike security update. The update was rolled out on Friday morning and affected Windows users all over the world.