The worldwide outage that affected Microsoft products on Tuesday (July 30), such as the email service Outlook and the video game Minecraft, has been fixed, according to a statement from the software behemoth.
The company added that initial findings indicate that a cyberattack and inadequate defenses against it were the root cause of the outage. The incident lasted for about ten hours and led thousands of users to report problems with Microsoft services. The company had already apologized for the incident.
It occurs less than two weeks after a critical worldwide outage caused by a faulty software upgrade by cybersecurity company CrowdStrike rendered 8.5 million machines running Microsoft systems inoperable, affecting healthcare and travel.
An update on the Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform’s website stated, “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.”
In order to take a website or online service offline or render it unavailable, DDoS assaults aim to overload it with internet traffic.
An earlier notice on the tech giant’s service status page stated that the outage had an impact on Microsoft 365, which comprises programs like Microsoft Office and Outlook, as well as Microsoft Azure, the cloud computing infrastructure that powers many of its services.
Other services that depend on Microsoft’s platforms have also been hit by the outage, Cambridge Water being one of them. The Dutch football team FC Twente informed their followers via Twitter that the outage has prevented supporters from accessing the club app and ticketing website.
