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3 August 2024

Microsoft says cyber-attack triggered latest outage

Graham Fraser & João da Silva

A global outage affecting Microsoft products including email service Outlook and video game Minecraft has been resolved, the technology giant said in an update.

The firm said preliminary investigations show the outage was caused by a cyber-attack and a failure to properly defend against it.

Earlier, the company issued an apology for the incident, which lasted almost 10 hours and caused thousands of users to report issues with Microsoft services.

It comes less than two weeks after a major global outage left around 8.5 million computers using Microsoft systems inaccessible, impacting healthcare and travel, after a flawed software update by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.

"While the initial trigger event was a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack... initial investigations suggest that an error in the implementation of our defences amplified the impact of the attack rather than mitigating it," said an update on the website of the Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform.

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