Microsoft has attributed the trigger to a configuration error that led to a 10-hour Azure outage that created intermittent errors, timeouts and latency spikes on many of its services was a distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.
In a statement, Microsoft said the services impacted 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.
Microsoft said once it understood the nature of the event, it implemented networking configuration changes to support its DDoS protection efforts and performed failovers to alternate networking paths to offer relief.
The incident started at approximately 11:45am UTC and was resolved at 19:43pm, according to Microsoft’s Azure status history page. According to Microsoft, a “subset of customers may have experienced issues connecting to a subset of Microsoft services globally.”
Microsoft admits that most organizations have protection in place to prevent DDoS from having an impact. The initial DDoS attack had activated the firm’s DDoS protection mechanisms, but an error in the implementation of defenses “amplified the impact of the attack rather than mitigating it.
