In an update to the Azure status page, Microsoft stated that the early root cause of an outage that hit the Azure Portal globally on Friday was a traffic “hike.”
Customers attempting to visit the Azure Portal at portal.azure.com on Friday afternoon experienced connectivity troubles and saw a warning state. The warning claimed, “Our services aren’t available right now.” Moreover, it claimed we’re working hard to get all services back up and running as quickly as possible. Please return shortly.
According to Redmond’s post on the Azure status page, the connection difficulties also impacted other Microsoft websites. This includes the Entra Admin Centre at entra.microsoft.com and Intune at intune.microsoft.com.
The microsoft 365 office parent company claims, “We noticed a hike in network traffic, that compromised our capacity to control traffic to these websites and caused customers to have access difficulties”.
The company also claimed to mitigate the issue, they engaged in various workstreams that used load-balancing processes. In addition to the auto-recovery operations that were already in place. Microsoft is also continuing to check the platform’s health.
Microsoft office 365 parent company expects to publish a preliminary post-event study with further details on the Azure Portal issue.
Anonymous Sudan
Microsoft could not elaborate on what was causing the Azure Portal connection difficulties. A threat actor known as Anonymous Sudan claimed to have carried out a DDoS assault. This corresponded with the “hike” in network traffic seen by Microsoft.
The same hacktivist organisation previously claimed to be attacking US corporations to oppose US meddling in Sudanese domestic matters. Nonetheless, some suspect that the threat actor behind these assaults is tied to Russia.
Last week, they claimed more DDoS strikes against Microsoft online sites for Outlook.com and OneDrive, both of which experienced downtime.
The Outlook.com outage began Monday evening and was resolved early Wednesday morning. Later, Redmond revealed that it had also affected other Microsoft services and functions. This includes services such as Outlook, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive for Business.
Microsoft informed in response to a question about Anonymous Sudan’s assertions that they are aware of these claims and are investigating. They are taking the necessary steps to protect their customers and ensure the stability of their services.
