Microsoft says new outage caused by cyberattack

The tech giant’s Azure cloud computing platform crashed for nearly 10 hours on Tuesday after a cyberattack, according to a company statement. Like other cloud services, it uses remote servers to store data and perform other computing tasks for a large number of users. Azure received a sudden spike in traffic, causing it to shut down just before 8 a.m. ET Tuesday. The shutdown impacted a collection of Microsoft services around the globe, including Azure App Services, Azure IoT Central, and the Azure portal itself. A subset of Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Purview services were also affected by the outage, the company said.

How widespread is the use of Azure? Microsoft reported that 95 percent of Fortune 500 countries trust their business on Azure. The company advertises the cloud service for uses in healthcare, government, retail, and manufacturing. Microsoft invests $1 billion each year in cybersecurity measures, according to Azure’s company page.

Why didn’t Microsoft’s defense programs work? The Distributed Denial-of-Service attack, or DDoS, on Azure triggered defensive measures to kick in, Microsoft said. But an initial investigation showed that those defensive measures were not executed properly and exacerbated the effects of the attacks, the statement said. The company plans to release more information within the next few days on the attack and the company’s response, along with an overarching public incident review within the next two weeks.

The latest attack comes less than two weeks after Microsoft systems around the world shut down after a cybersecurity update went wrong. The outage caused problems for global finance firms and emergency services. Nearly 1,000 flights were delayed in the United States after the attack and over 1,700 were delayed according to flight-tracking website FlightAware.

Dig deeper: Listen to Mary Reichard’s report on The World and Everything in It about the global outage.