Microsoft says Azure outage began as a DDoS cyberattack

(Bloomberg) — Microsoft Corp. said an outage in Azure cloud applications was triggered by a distributed denial-of-service cyberattack.

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The DDoS attack began on Tuesday and a bug in Microsoft’s automated protection mechanisms worsened the impact rather than mitigating it, the company said in a status update.

Customers were affected in multiple regions, including services running on Azure. For example, mobile ordering at Starbucks Corp. were down for hours due to issues affecting Azure, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Denial of service attacks direct internet traffic to a website in high volume to disrupt or shut it down. The incidents have become a persistent annoyance for financial institutions, causing intermittent downtime and forcing security personnel to push back on the activity.

Reports of outages in Azure and Microsoft 365 began rising shortly after 7 a.m. in New York and included hundreds of complaints at the peak of the incident, according to user reports compiled by Downdetector. Microsoft said the incident was resolved around 5 p.m. in New York.

The issue also affected several Microsoft 365 services and features, Microsoft said in a post on the social network X. Microsoft 365 includes common productivity applications such as Outlook, Word and Excel.

Mobile ordering for Starbucks was largely restored by 1pm in New York. The company was working to resolve limited outages that continued, a Starbucks spokesperson said.

Earlier this month, about 8 million computers running the Windows operating system crashed after cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. Additionally, Microsoft has also been grappling with the fallout from a series of cyberattacks that led to the US government US to issue a scathing report calling for company-wide changes.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella touted progress in the company’s cybersecurity products during a conference call Tuesday after the company reported quarterly earnings. He said the company has more than 1.2 million security customers.

“We continue to prioritize safety above all else,” said Nadella.

(Updates to indicate the outage began as a cyberattack.)

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