Microsoft confirmed that its latest spate of service outages that left thousands unable to access Outlook, Xbox Live, or Minecraft were caused by a malicious cyberattack.
Microsoft says it was hit by a DDOS attack which its own systems amplified. The identity of the attackers behind the outage is likely to remain unknown. READ MORE: Microsoft has confirmed that its latest global outage was caused by a malicious cyberattack.
Sylvain Cortes, vice president of strategy at cybersecurity firm Hackuity, told MailOnline: 'Rogue actors, cybergangs, and nation-states alike leverage these tactics, so further investigation is required to determine the origin of the threat.' At the time, the tech giant's service status website showed an alert for 'network infrastructure,' which is critical for connectivity and communication between users, apps, devices and the internet.
In a post on X, formerly Twitter, Microsoft said that it was experiencing widespread issues with Microsoft 365 services such as the email system Outlook This is a very basic form of cyberattack in which the malicious party sends vast amounts of internet traffic to a website or server so that legitimate web traffic can't get through.
Read More Microsoft say CrowdStrike outage affected 8.5million Windows devices with more disruption on the way Pieter Arntz, senior threat researcher at cybersecurity firm Malwarebytes, explains that sometimes errors in the victim's own systems will boost the power of a DDOS attack. Unlike the previous outage which caused disruption at airports around the world this latest outage was triggered by a malicious attack from an unknown group
Mr Higgins says: 'It could be a Hacktivist group again, looking to perhaps show how reliant organisations around the world are on their IT services from Microsoft and in general. Jake Moore, global cybersecurity advisor at ESET, told MailOnline: 'Such attacks are rarely attributed to anyone as the perpetrators can easily hide and evade detection.'
'From what we have seen over the last couple of weeks we have learnt to expect the unexpected more than ever. To witness two major outages in such a short space of time is unprecedented but maybe not entirely independent.' The attack came at an especially bad time for the company as it brought service to a standstill just hours before Microsoft was due to present its latest financial update.
This comes just two weeks after a faulty software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike knocked 8.5 million Microsoft devices offline. Tens of thousands of flights were cancelled across the globe as CrowdStrikes 'Falcon Sensor' update caused Windows to crash - leaving many with the infamous 'blue screen of death'.WHAT CAUSED FACEBOOK'S LARGEST EVER OUTAGE?On March 14, 2019, Facebook experienced the largest outage in the social network's history.
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