Microsoft Confirms DDoS Attacks: 5 Things To Know

Security News Kyle Alspach June 20, 2023, 10:47 AM EDT

After a series of outages to cloud services including Microsoft 365 and the Azure portal earlier this month, the company acknowledged that it had been hit with distributed denial-of-service attacks meant to knock websites offline.

While Microsoft is no stranger to outages, the series of service issues the company recently experienced earlier in June was striking. On back-to-back days in early June, Microsoft 365 services such as Teams and Outlook saw widespread outages, followed by a major OneDrive outage days later. Then the following day, the portal for Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform went down for thousands of users.

[Related: Microsoft Grapples With ‘Recurrence’ Of Microsoft 365 Service Issues]

While Microsoft initially didn’t specify a specific cause for the nearly weeklong string of outages, the company has now confirmed that DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks were responsible. Media outlets including BleepingComputer had previously reported that a hactivist group claimed responsibility for the Microsoft service outages.

In its disclosure, Microsoft said it has identified a group responsible for the attacks and provided details on some of the group’s tactics. The company did not, however, provide specifics about the full impacts of the outages to some of its most popular cloud services. CRN has reached out to Microsoft for further comment.

What follows are five key things to know about the recent wave of DDoS attacks against Microsoft cloud services.

Kyle Alspach

Kyle Alspach is a Senior Editor at CRN focused on cybersecurity. His coverage spans news, analysis and deep dives on the cybersecurity industry, with a focus on fast-growing segments such as cloud security, application security and identity security.  He can be reached at kalspach@thechannelcompany.com.