A global outage impacting Microsoft products, including Outlook and Minecraft, has been resolved, the tech giant announced. Preliminary investigations indicate the outage resulted from a cyber-attack and a failure in the company’s defenses.
Earlier, Microsoft apologized for the incident, which lasted nearly 10 hours and affected thousands of users. This comes shortly after another major outage caused by a flawed software update by CrowdStrike, impacting 8.5 million computers.
Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform reported that a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack triggered the outage. The company’s defenses inadvertently amplified the attack’s impact. DDoS attacks flood online services with traffic to render them inaccessible.
Security expert Professor Alan Woodward expressed surprise at Microsoft’s vulnerability, expecting their infrastructure to be more resilient. The outage affected Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365 (including Office and Outlook), Intune, and Entra.
Microsoft implemented a fix showing improvement and is monitoring the situation to ensure full recovery. The company apologized on X (formerly Twitter).
The outage affected various services relying on Microsoft’s platforms, such as Cambridge Water, the HM Courts and Tribunals Service, and NatWest. FC Twente’s ticketing website and app were also impacted.
This issue arose just before Microsoft was set to release its latest financial update. Despite Azure’s role as a key profit driver, demand has slowed, unsettling investors. Microsoft’s shares fell 2.7% in after-hours trading after reporting weaker-than-expected growth for April-June. Revenue in the “intelligent cloud” unit rose 21% year-on-year, with overall revenue increasing 15% to $64.7 billion, and profit rising 11% to $22 billion.