Another Microsoft Azure Outage Caused Two-Hour Service Interruption

On August 5, a Microsoft Azure outage that lasted more than two hours interrupted service for customers across North America and Latin America. The incident affected services that leverage Azure Front Door, the company’s modern cloud Content Delivery Network.

Sergiu Gatlan, reporting in Bleeping Computer, says the incident is not confined to the western hemisphere. Customers have experienced errors connecting to Azure services (including Azure DevOps) in the United Kingdom, with the Azure DevOps status page also tagging the issues as affecting Brazilian users.

The incident came a week after an Azure outage that caused access issues and poor performance for customers worldwide. According to Microsoft, that outage was triggered by a denial-of-service attack that targeted multiple Azure Front Door and CDN sites.

In a statement, Microsoft said: “While the initial trigger event was a Distributed Denial-of-Service attack, which activated our DDoS protection mechanisms, initial investigations suggest that an error in the implementation of our defenses amplified the impact of the attack rather than mitigating it.”

Global outages hit Microsoft 365 services in July 2022, following a faulty Enterprise Configuration Service deployment, and in January 2023, after a Wide Area Network IP change.

In June 2023, Microsoft confirmed that its Azure, Outlook, and OneDrive web portals were taken down in Layer 7 DDoS attacks by a hacker known as Anonymous Sudan (aka Storm-1359), believed to have Russian ties.