Microsoft Unveils Cyberattacks as Cause of Recent Service Outages, Assures No Customer Data Compromise

Microsoft has revealed that the service disruptions encountered earlier this month were a result of cyberattacks, although no evidence of customer data compromise has been found. The attacks, identified as distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) incidents, involved an increase in traffic against specific Microsoft services, causing temporary availability issues. While Microsoft is actively investigating the matter, the company has yet to disclose the responsible party. Notably, this marks the fourth outage experienced by Microsoft within a year.

KUALA LUMPUR, 19 June 2023 – Microsoft has confirmed that the service disruptions experienced earlier this month were the result of cyberattacks, although no evidence of customer data compromise has been found, the company announced on Friday.

In a blog post, Microsoft stated that it had detected an increase in traffic targeting specific services, leading to temporary availability issues. The technology giant promptly launched an investigation and identified the threat actor as Storm-1359, subsequently monitoring the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) activity.

At present, Microsoft has not disclosed the identity of the responsible party. DDoS attacks aim to disrupt targeted servers by flooding them with high volumes of internet traffic. On June 5, Microsoft’s 365 software suite, including popular applications like Teams and Outlook, experienced an outage lasting over two hours, impacting thousands of users. This incident marked the fourth outage for Microsoft within the span of a year.