Microsoft has reported a recent service disruption on their Azure cloud applications due to a DDoS (distributed-denial-of-service) cyberattack. This attack, launched early Tuesday, was intensified due to a technical error in Microsoft’s automatic security measures instead of alleviating it, the firm shared in a status update.
This cyber attack affected users across various global regions, impacting services hosted on Azure. For instance, Starbucks’s mobile ordering feature was down for several hours due to this Azure-related problem, a source familiar with the situatiion explained.
A denial-of-service assault overloads a website with excessive internet traffic in order to destabilise or shut it down. Having become a recurring inconvenience for monetary bodies now, it leads to periodic service downtime and requires security personnel to ward off such incidents.
The reports of outages on both Azure and Microsoft 365 began to mushroom soon after 7am in New York with a surge in user complaints, as gathered by Downdetector. Microsoft confirmed that the issue was resolved by around 5pm (New York time).
This situation also extended to various aspects and services of Microsoft 365, including popular productivity applications such as Outlook, Word and Excel, as reported by Microsoft in a post on social network X.
Mobile ordering service for Starbucks was largely back in operation by around 1pm in New York. The company was striving to resolve minor disruptions that followed, as per a spokesperson from Starbucks.
Just a few weeks back, almost 8 million computers operating on the Windows platform met with a crash following a fault in the software update provided by cybersecurity company CrowdStrike Holdings. Additionally, Microsoft has recently been tackling the repercussions from a number of cyberattacks, leading to a harsh report by the US government demanding comprehensive changes in the company.
Despite the aforementioned challenges, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella lauded the improvement in the company’s cyber security products in a conference call on Tuesday after the quarterly earnings report was presented. He also pointed out that the company currently has upwards of 1.2 million security users. ‘Security remains our utmost priority,’ Mr Nadella stated.