Microsoft 365 and a number of Azure services have been taken offline for users following an attempted cyberattack on the company’s systems, it has been confirmed.
Users around the world saw their service disrupted after a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack triggered Microsoft’s internal security systems.
However, in an embarrassing admission, the company admitted that these systems “actually increased the impact of the attack rather than mitigating it.”
Azure attack
“Between approximately 11:45 UTC and 19:43 UTC on July 30, 2024, a portion of customers may have experienced issues connecting to some of the Microsoft services worldwide,” a update listed on the official Azure status hub.
“The affected services include Azure App Services, Application Insights, Azure IoT Central, Azure Log Search Alerts, Azure Policy, as well as the Azure portal itself and a subset of Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Purview services.”
The company noted that it experienced an “unexpected spike in usage” across Azure Front Door (AFD) and Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN), causing them to underperform and experience outages, timeouts, and latency spikes.
Microsoft says it immediately began investigating the attack and that the effects were contained about an hour and a half later. After an initial rollout of a fix across the Asia-Pacific and European networks, a global rollout took place and the issue appeared to be contained about an hour after the first reports.
The issue emerged days after a flawed security update for CrowdStrike potentially knocked millions of Microsoft devices offline worldwide, and the company is understandably on edge about any further problems.
Microsoft says it will now conduct a full internal investigation to “understand the incident in more detail” and promises to publish an initial report within days. The full report will follow within 14 days.