It is not unusual for Internet services to have occasional problems that affect users. It all depends on the scale and what companies can guarantee to protect themselves from this type of attacks that hackers and other malicious agents manage to generate.
A Microsoft was exposed to such a problem in early June, which left several of its services inaccessible for several hours. From what the company described, it affected Outlook on the web, OneDrive, and other company propositions.
We're reviewing our networking systems and recent updates in an effort to identify the underlying root cause of the issue. Additional information can be found in the admin center under EX571516.
- Microsoft 365 Status (@ MSFT365Status) June 5, 2023
Origin was in a large scale DDoS attack
Now, and with much more information about what happened, Microsoft has detailed the problem and how it managed to mitigate it. It revealed that it was a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) and that it was quickly resolved by the company.
From what Microsoft described, the attacks "temporarily impacted" the availability of some services. He added that these were created mainly to generate "publicity" for a group of malicious agents, which the company dubbed Storm-1359.
Microsoft detailed what happened in this issue
Even more important is the information that no evidence was detected that user data was accessed or compromised. In a later statement from Microsoft, the company confirmed that the group Anonymous Sudan was responsible for the attacks.
It was unclear how many Microsoft customers were affected by the attacks or whether the impact of this DDoS attack was global. The company believes that Storm-1359 likely relied on a combination of virtual private servers and rented cloud infrastructure to carry out its malicious operation.
