Microsoft says DDoS attack led to latest global outage of Azure services

However, it has not named any specific threat actor to be behind the DDoS attack.

“While the initial trigger event was a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack, which activated our DDoS protection mechanisms, initial investigations suggest that an error in the implementation of our defenses amplified the impact of the attack rather than mitigating it,” Microsoft said.

While responding to the outage, the company had said that an “unexpected usage spike” had “resulted in Azure Front Door (AFD) and Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) components performing below acceptable thresholds, leading to intermittent errors, timeout, and latency spikes.”

“Once the nature of the usage spike was understood, we implemented networking configuration changes to support our DDoS protection efforts, and performed failovers to alternate networking paths to provide relief,” it added.

Tuesday’s outage is the second time in one month wherein thousands of Microsoft’s customers were impacted. On July 19, Microsoft said that a configuration change on the backend of its cloud computing services led to connectivity loss for customers primarily in the central US region.

That same day, a faulty update deployed by cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike led to Windows PC systems displaying the ‘blue screen of death’, bringing airports, hospitals, banks, news outlets, and other companies across the world to a brief standstill.

What is a DDoS attack?

When a website or server is flooded with errant traffic, it can diminish the website’s functionality and even result in the website or other services going offline. This is known as a DDoS attack, and it is reportedly one of the most common cyber threats.

Threat actors often target websites and servers belonging to e-commerce, gaming, and telecom companies in order to damage their business, sales, and reputation. Hackers could also launch DDoS attacks in order to infiltrate a company’s database and gain access to confidential information. While some DDoS attacks last for just a few hours, they can also go on for days.