A few weeks after the technical problem in the security platform used by Microsoft to protect its software and services and led to a global electronic blackout of the company’s systems they collapsed again on Tuesday afternoon. Popular services from the company such as email (Outlook email) and online video games (Minecraft) were down with the software giant reporting the problem and looking into its cause to resolve it. Several other Microsoft customer service and websites also experienced problems.
Finally, after about eight hours, the systems that had collapsed began to work again and Microsoft announced that the problem was caused by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) cyber attack that the company’s security systems not only failed to repel, but due to a failure in the security mechanism, the process of dealing with the problem, acted as an ally of the attack, inflating it instead of containing it as it unfolded.
It now remains to be seen whether this is a new security flaw or a… side effect related to the previous problem that caused the global blackout.
Naftemporiki.gr