Word is going around that a cyber attack caused the Microsoft Teams and Office 365 outage but is malicious activity truly the culprit?
Microsoft had just experienced a major outage in its Teams, Outlook, and Office 365 services. While the issue has already been addressed by the tech giant, the cause of the outage is still a mystery to most people.
The services provided by the tech company are an integral part of society today, especially during this pandemic. A major disruption to their services would no doubt encumber countless of businesses and people worldwide.
Many suspected a cyber attack to be the cause of the outage but is that really the case?
The early hours of the Microsoft outage
Around 5 P.M. E.T. on Monday, many Outlook, Teams, Office 365 users began experiencing service issues. At the same time, Sharepoint, OneDrive, Exchange, and Azure users were having sign-in issues.
Microsoft then took to Twitter to confirm that significant outages had affected many of their services.
#Microsoft365 is experiencing significant outages that are affecting multiple Microsoft services including https://t.co/GjSRC1O588, Teams and Office. Keep up to date with the status via Twitter @MSFT365Status pic.twitter.com/fhLipYXXio
— itro (@itromelbourne) September 29, 2020
We're investigating an issue affecting access to multiple Microsoft 365 services. We're working to identify the full impact and will provide more information shortly.
— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) September 28, 2020
According to the reports, several users were unable to log-in. Every time they tried to do so, an error message would pop up informing them of a problem. The service issues continued on through to the evening.
Damage control
By this time, many were already wondering about the cause of such service disruption. It didn’t take too long before Microsoft posted another update.
According to them, a change they had recently made on their system seems to have caused the issues. The company also revealed that they started to roll out the changes in order to mitigate the impact of the issue.
Unfortunately, rolling back the changes did not have any significant effect on the issue. The tech giant admitted that there was no increase in successful connections and thus needed to investigate the root cause of the problem.
No malicious activity involved
Around this time, the word on the vine is that Microsoft may have suffered from a cyber attack, hence the disruption of their services. The company’s failure to quickly resolve the issue further gave rise to this suspicion.
However, Microsoft itself had confirmed that the issue hadn’t been caused by a cyber attack.
“At this time, we’ve seen no indication that this is the result of malicious activity,” representatives for the company said in a statement to CNN.
Resolution
The issue only took a positive turn when the company decided to reroute traffic to an alternate route. Further updates revealed that user experience had started to improve and that their system is starting to recover. The majority of their services had started to recover and that they’re only monitoring residual issues left behind by the outage.
We’ve confirmed that the residual issue has been addressed and the incident has been resolved. Any users still experiencing impact should be mitigated shortly. Additional details can be found in the admin center under MO222965 or https://t.co/lbjX5iaxCX
— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) September 29, 2020
Finally, at around 10 P.M. E.T., Microsoft announced that the residual issues had finally been resolved.
Images courtesy of geralt,efes/Pixabay