Microsoft says early June service outages were cyberattacks

Redmond, June 18 (BNA): Microsoft said Friday that the outages that affected certain services of the company during some days earlier this month were the result of cyberattacks, but said it saw no evidence of any customer data being accessed or compromised.

“Beginning in early June 2023, Microsoft has identified increases in traffic for certain services that temporarily affected availability,” the company said in a blog post.

Microsoft said it opened an investigation and began tracking DDoS activity by the threat actor it refers to as Storm-1359 after it identified the threat.

DDoS attacks work by directing large amounts of internet traffic toward target servers in a relatively unsophisticated attempt to take them offline.

The Microsoft 365 suite of programs, including Teams and Outlook, was down for more than two hours to more than a thousand users on June 5 and a short repeat the next morning. This was Microsoft’s fourth such outage in a year.

MI