Weeks after the “blue screen of death”, cyber attack causes new Microsoft outage

Less than two weeks after the global outage, dubbed the “blue screen of death,” Microsoft suffered another similar incident, which the company said was triggered by a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) cyberattack. According to Forbes, the latest attack was reported by several users on Tuesday, in which users complained of being unable to access various Microsoft services such as Office, Outlook, and Azure. The incident lasted almost 10 hours. Companies affected by the new outage include British bank NatWest, according to the BBC.

Other impacted services included Azure App Services, Application Insights, Azure IoT Central, Azure Log Search Alerts, Azure Policy, as well as the Azure portal itself and “a subset of Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Purview services.”

The tech giant said it was a DDoS attack that floods a service with traffic to bring it to a halt.

Companies typically implement protection against DDoS attacks, but a mistake in implementing the defenses “amplified the impact of the attack rather than mitigating it,” Microsoft said.

This is the second major attack in almost as many weeks. A Microsoft error paralyzed Windows computers around the world on July 19th. It was later revealed that an update to CrowdStrike’s ‘Falcon Sensor’ antivirus program caused the massive outage.

From airlines to news channels, the failure led to the collapse of IT systems, disrupting daily procedures.

CrowdStrike’s products are predominantly used by large organizations that require robust protection against cyberattacks, which is why the attack caused global disruption.

Reacting to the flaw, Crowdstrike CEO George Kurtz said it was not a security incident or cyberattack. The company identified the issue, isolated it, and deployed a fix.