Microsoft: Azure outage caused by 'spike in network traffic'

Activist group claims responsibility, Microsoft stays schtum

Microsoft said that a "spike in network traffic" has been identified as the likely cause of Friday's outage that impacted access to the portal for its Azure cloud platform.

The Azure portal was one of several Microsoft services that went down at various points last week. Earlier in the week, availability issues impacted OneDrive Thursday and took down several Microsoft 365 services—including Teams and SharePoint Online—on Monday and Tuesday of last week.

In a post update, Microsoft said that a burst of traffic has been found to be the preliminary root cause of Friday's Azure portal outage, although the Redmond-based company didn't offer specifics about the source of the sudden increased traffic.

"We identified a spike in network traffic which impacted the ability to manage traffic to these sites and resulted in the issues for customers to access these sites," Microsoft said in the update.

According to a BleepingComputer report Friday, a hacktivist group known as "Anonymous Sudan"—which had claimed responsibility for the OneDrive outage on Thursday— claimed on Telegram that it had carried out DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks against the Azure portal.

Microsoft did not directly address the claim when asked about it by CRN. However, Thursday, Microsoft said in a statement that it was "aware of these claims"—referring to the hacktivist group's claim of responsibility for the earlier OneDrive outage—and was investigating.

To resolve the Azure portal outage Friday, Microsoft said that it "engaged in different workstreams applying load balancing processes in addition to the auto-recovery operations in place in order to mitigate the issue." The issues were resolved several hours after they began on Friday.

This article first appeared on CRN