DDoS Attack Knocks Azure Offline
Microsoft says that a widespread outage of Azure cloud applications was triggered by a Distributed-Denial-of-Service (DDoS) cyber attack. This incident affected a range of Microsoft products, including Outlook email services and the leading video gaming platform, Minecraft.
An unknown number of Azure customers, including some financial institutions, utilities and government agencies, suffered intermittent downtime and cyber security teams had to scramble to deal with the incident, which is now understood to have been resolved.
This event follows two weeks after the CrowdStrike outage which similarly affected users of Microsoft products and services.
The company said their initial investigations show the outage was caused by a failure to adequately defend against a large-scale cyber attack. Microsoft has now issued an apology for the incident, which caused thousands of users to report issues with its services.
"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," said an update on the website of the Microsoft Azure cloud platform.
DDoS attacks work by flooding a website or online service with internet traffic in an attempt to knock it offline, making inaccessible to users.
- Amongst those affected were the British utility firm, Cambridge Water. "Due to worldwide issues with Microsoft Azure, a problem with our website is affecting several services including MyAccount and PayNow," it said on X.
- The British Courts and Tribunals Service, which is responsible for the administration of criminal, civil and family courts and tribunals in England and Wales, also said that it was aware of issues affecting multiple online services.
- Customers of the NatWest online banking platform also experience problems in accessing their accounts to carry out payments and transfers.
Microsoft Azure has been a key profit driver for Microsoft in recent years, but growth has slowed in recent months fie to fierce competition in the cloud services business, causing concern amongst investors. Shares in the firm dropped by 2.7% in after-hours trade recently after the company reported weaker growth than expected in the April-June period.
This latest incident emphasises the risks that organisations take in placing a critical reliance on a single service supplier in a market for cloud services which is dominated by a small number of giant firms, who have proved capable of driving down costs to deter new entrants.
Azure | BBC | Mail | Cambridge Water | HMCTS | Yahoo | Yahoo | Sun |
Image: Ideogram
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