A little less than two weeks ago, businesses, hospitals, government agencies, and airlines were dealing with the consequences of a massive IT failure after Microsoft experienced a meltdown that engulfed millions on the worldwide web.
The disruption impacted emails, Xbox Live, and 365 functions, which were also knocked offline during the earlier outage.
Microsoft’s service status website shows an alert for ‘network infrastructure,’ which is critical for connectivity and communication between users, apps, devices and the internet.The previous outage was triggered by CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity software company, but the current issue has not yet been linked to the firm.’We are investigating reports of issues connecting to Microsoft services globally. Customers may experience timeouts connecting to Azure services,’ Microsoft said in a post on X.’We have multiple engineering teams engaged to diagnose and resolve the issue. More details will be provided as soon as possible.’
Microsoft indicates it was a cyber-attack and that the implementation of its defenses amplified the attack.
“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,” said an update on the website of the Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform.DDoS attacks work by flooding a website or online service with internet traffic in an attempt to throw it offline, or otherwise make it inaccessible.”It seems slightly surreal that we’re experiencing another serious outage of online services from Microsoft,” said computer security expert Professor Alan Woodward.“You’d expect Microsoft’s network infrastructure to be bomb-proof.”
Meanwhile, Delta Air Lines has reportedly hired a prominent law firm to help carrier pursue potential damages from the first CrowdStrike/Microsoft outage that caused a slew of internal computer issues and prompted thousands of canceled flights earlier this month.
CNBC first reported that Delta had hired Boies Schiller Flexner LLP, the law firm whose chairman David Boies previously represented the U.S. government in the landmark antitrust case against Microsoft.Although a lawsuit has not yet been filed, CNBC reported that Delta plans to seek potential compensation from both companies.When asked for further comment on the matter and the report that Delta had hired Boies, a spokesperson for the airline told ABC News that the company had “no information to add.”
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