New York: Microsoft products including email service Outlook and video game Minecraft were affected by another global outage. The company said in an update that the outage has been resolved and preliminary investigations show the outage was caused by a cyber-attack and a failure to defend against the same.
The outage lasted almost 10 hours and caused thousands of users to report issues with Microsoft services. It came less than two weeks after a major global outage that impacted around 8.5 million computers using Microsoft systems. The outage, which impacted healthcare and travel, occurred after a flawed software update by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.
An update on the website of the Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform 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 defences amplified the impact of the attack rather than mitigating it.”
Microsoft said it had implemented a fix for the problem which “shows improvement” and the tech giant would monitor the situation “to ensure full recovery”. The company said in a post on X (formerly Twitter), “We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience.”