Microsoft: Service Outages Earlier This Month Due to Cyberattacks

Microsoft disclosed that "the outages affecting specific services of the company during several days earlier this month were a result of cyberattacks," but clarified that "there is no indication of customer data being breached or accessed." The company added in a blog post: "Since early June 2023, Microsoft observed an increase in network usage against certain services, which temporarily affected the availability of (data)." Microsoft stated that it "launched an investigation and began tracking the attacks that caused the service denial by a threat actor referred to as 'Storm-1359' after identifying the source of the threat." Denial of service attacks operate by overwhelming the server with a massive amount of traffic, resulting in service disruptions. The Microsoft 365 suite, including Teams and Outlook, remained disrupted for over two hours for thousands of users on June 5, and this briefly recurred the following morning. This was the fourth such outage for Microsoft within the year.