Weeks After "Blue Screen Of Death", Cyberattack Causes New Microsoft Outage

Less than two weeks after global outage, dubbed as "blue screen of death", Microsoft suffered another similar incident, which the company said was triggered by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) cyberattack. According to Forbes, the latest attack was reported by several users on Tuesday in which users complained of not being able to access several Microsoft services, such as Office, Outlook and Azure. The incident lasted nearly 10 hours. Companies affected by the new outage include UK bank NatWest, as per the BBC.

Other impacted services 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".

The tech giant said it was a DDoS attack that floods a service with traffic in order to bring them to a standstill.

Firms usually put protection in place for DDoS attacks, but an error in the implementation of defences "amplified the impact of the attack rather than mitigating it", said Microsoft.

This is the second major attack in nearly as many weeks. A Microsoft error had crippled Windows computers worldwide on July 19. It was later revealed that an update to the anti-virus program 'Falcon Sensor' by CrowdStrike caused the massive outage.

From airlines to news channels, the glitch led to the crashing of IT systems, disrupting the daily proceedings.

CrowdStrike's products are predominantly used by major organisations needing robust cyber attack protection, which is why the attack caused a global outage.

Reacting to the glitch, Crowdstrike CEO George Kurtz said it was not a security incident or cyberattack. The company identified the issue, isolated it and deployed a fix.