Microsoft has announced that it has fixed a large-scale outage that affected many popular services, including the Outlook email client and the Minecraft game. The problems continued for almost 10 hours, causing numerous complaints from users around the world.
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According to preliminary data, the cause of the failure was a DDoS attack (distributed denial of service), aggravated by an error in the Microsoft security system, reports the BBC. The company admitted that their security measures not only failed to prevent the attack, but also increased its negative impact.
«Although the initial causative event was a DDoS attack, the investigation shows that a failure in the implementation of our protective measures increased the impact of the attack rather than mitigating it,” Microsoft said in a statement.
The incident comes less than two weeks after a global outage caused by a flawed software update by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike left nearly 8.5 million computers running Microsoft operating systems unusable.
Earlier, an alert appeared on the company’s website saying that the outage affected Microsoft Azure (a cloud computing platform) and Microsoft 365, which includes applications such as Microsoft Office and Outlook. Cloud systems Intune and Entra were also affected.
Microsoft said on July 31 that the issue had been fixed and the situation would be monitored. “We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may cause,” said a post on X (formerly Twitter).