Microsoft Confirms June Service Outages Were Cyberattacks

Microsoft on Friday said that outages that affected some services of the company earlier this month were the result of cyberattacks, reported Reuters. However, according to the company there is no evidence that any customer data was compromised.

The company in a blog post said, "Beginning in early June 2023, Microsoft identified surges in traffic against some servers that temporarily impacted availability."

Microsoft said that it had opened an investigation and started tracking the DDoS activity by the threat actor that the company is calling Storm-1359.

What is DDoS and how does it work?

A high volume of internet traffic towards any targeted servers in an unsophisticated bid to know the server offline is known as DDoS attack. These attacks make the website unreachable without penetrating it. According to security experts this nuisance form of attack can disrupt the work of millions if they can successfully interrupt the services of software of tech giants like Microsoft.

Attack on June 5

Earlier this month on June 5, Microsoft 365 software suites including Teams and Outlook were down for over 2 hours for more than 1,000 users and a brief recurrence on the following morning. This was the fourth such outage for Microsoft in a year.

On June 8, BleepingComputer.com a computer security news site reported that cloud-based OneDrive file-hosting was globally down for a time.

The attacks continued through the week and on June 9, the company confirmed that its Azure cloud computing platform had been affected.