Microsoft experienced a worldwide outage of its Azure Portal, with customers unable to access the platform due to connectivity issues. The company identified a traffic spike as the preliminary root cause, which impacted the ability to manage traffic and resulted in customers being unable to access the portal and other Microsoft websites such as Entra Admin center and Intune.
Microsoft deployed load balancing processes and auto-recovery operations to mitigate the issue, and a post-incident review is expected to be published soon.
While Microsoft did not provide specific details about the cause of the connectivity issues, a threat actor known as Anonymous Sudan claimed responsibility for conducting a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, which aligns with the observed spike in network traffic.
Anonymous Sudan has previously targeted U.S. companies to protest interference in Sudanese internal affairs, and there are suspicions of a possible Russian connection to the attacks.
In addition to the Azure Portal outage, Anonymous Sudan also claimed responsibility for DDoS attacks on Microsoft web portals for Outlook.com and OneDrive, causing outages for those services as well.
The Outlook.com outage affected other Microsoft services like Outlook, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive for Business. Microsoft is aware of the claims made by Anonymous Sudan and is currently investigating while taking necessary measures to protect customers and ensure service stability.
