Recently, Microsoft’s services and servers experienced a new outage that lasted for several hours. This comes shortly after a Windows BSOD issue that affected millions of PCs around the world. Now, the company has revealed the reason for the latest outage, making a mea culpa.
Popular products such as Outlook and Minecraft were among those affected by Microsoft’s latest server crash. According to an official report, the origin of the outage was a DDOS attack. This kind of attack is based on overloading a server with countless simultaneous requests until it goes offline. You would think that a company like Microsoft would be practically immune to something like this, but that was not the case.
Microsoft admits fault in its latest server outage
However, Microsoft also admitted its fault in the situation. The report reads as follows: “While the initial trigger event was a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack… initial investigations suggest that an error in the implementation of our defenses amplified the impact of the attack rather than mitigating it.” So, the measures taken by the company in response to the attack did more harm than good.
As a result of the incorrect implementation of defense systems against the attack, the outage on Microsoft services lasted up to 10 hours. Unlike the Windows outage that caused BSOD on around 8.5 million PCs globally, this time the blame falls on the Redmond giant. The previous outage was the result of a faulty update rollout by CrowdStrike, a cyber-security solutions company.
Various websites & platforms were affected
The situation did not only affect Microsoft services but also websites, platforms, and organizations with systems built around Azure servers. This includes banks, courts, hospitals, and even football teams.
Microsoft apologized for the incident through a post on X while confirming the implementation of a fix. They also said that they would remain vigilant as events developed. Currently, Microsoft’s status page indicates that all of the company’s services are up and running. So, it seems that everything is under control now.