Microsoft Says Cyber-Attack Triggered Latest Outage

A global outage affecting Microsoft products, including Outlook and Minecraft, was resolved after nearly 10 hours.

The outage, allegedly caused by a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack and a failure in defense implementation, led to thousands of user reports, writes the BBC. It comes less than two weeks after a major global outage left around 8.5 million computers using Microsoft systems inaccessible, impacting healthcare and travel, after a flawed software update by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.

From what we have seen over the last couple of weeks, we have learned to expect the unexpected more than ever. To witness two major outages in such a short space of time is unprecedented but maybe not entirely independent. Cybercriminals are clearly testing their skill sets at greater lengths, and this needs to reflect on the amount of robust protection that is now required to hold off this next generation of attacks.

Guest post by ESET Ireland. You can follow ESET Ireland on X (ex-Twitter), Facebook or LinkedIn for more cybersecurity tips.