Microsoft Azure, a cloud computing platform, experienced a significant outage on July 30 that lasted nearly 10 hours. The tech giant confirmed that the outage was triggered by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) cyberattack.
What's next?
When a major incident occurs, there is always a trail of takeaways to uncover.
As the immediate impacts of the global outage wind-down, here are some thoughts for CIOs and CISOs, as we go forward: https://t.co/BBVOHwK95F pic.twitter.com/snID7PSTNt
— BlackBerry (@BlackBerry) July 30, 2024
Users reported difficulties accessing several Microsoft services, including Microsoft 365 products such as Office and Outlook, and Azure.
The incident occurred less than two weeks after another major disruption. According to Microsoft, the outage began at approximately 11:45 am UTC and was resolved by 19:43 pm. Companies affected by the outage included U.K. bank NatWest and others.
When CrowdStrike 'broke the internet', China remained largely unaffected.
Discover the intriguing reasons behind this digital divide:#Cybersecurity #CloudComputing #TechNewshttps://t.co/yw6uKzdO2e
— Dashveenjit Kaur (@DashveenjitK) July 30, 2024
New on @Forbes
Microsoft's Azure outage was triggered by a DDoS attack, due to an error in its protection mechanisms. Thanks @SeanWrightSec for commentshttps://t.co/PRiqYP3Sb0
— Kate O'Flaherty (@KateOflaherty) July 31, 2024
Microsoft stated that a “subset of customers may have experienced issues connecting to a subset of Microsoft services globally.” Impacted services included Azure App Services, Application Insights, Azure IoT Central, Azure Log Search Alerts, Azure Policy, the Azure portal, and “a subset of Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Purview services.
As we saw with the pandemic-era supply chain crisis, we can no longer rely on a few mega-corporations to keep our economy moving.
Last weekend's IT outages proved it — offering an urgent lesson: Public interest must come before private pockets.https://t.co/6HkDkRawQc
— Groundwork Collaborative (@Groundwork) July 28, 2024
The company explained that the “initial trigger event” was a DDoS attack, where adversaries flood services with traffic to immobilize them.
Microsoft Azure outage impacts services
The attack caused an unexpected usage spike, which led Azure Front Door and Azure Content Delivery Network components to perform below acceptable thresholds, resulting in intermittent errors, timeouts, and latency spikes.
Although most firms have DDoS protection mechanisms, the initial attack activated Microsoft’s defenses. However, an error in the implementation caused the defenses to amplify the attack’s impact rather than mitigate it. Sean Wright, head of application security at Featurespace, commented, “This highlights the importance of thoroughly testing software to protect against DDoS attacks.
Similarly to a recent CrowdStrike issue, it appears an error occurred in the protective software.”
Microsoft communicated clearly throughout the outage and announced it will publish a Preliminary Post Incident Review within 72 hours. This review will provide more details on what happened and how Microsoft responded. Currently, Microsoft services appear to be back up and running smoothly.
April Isaacs is a news contributor for DevX.com She is long-term, self-proclaimed nerd. She loves all things tech and computers and still has her first Dreamcast system. It is lovingly named Joni, after Joni Mitchell.
