Microsoft Global Outage Could Be Due To Malicious Attacks, Says Expert

Malicious attacks could be behind the Microsoft global outage currently affecting businesses, including stock trading platforms, banks and airlines, according to a cyber expert.

Hostile elements could be attacking the code, leading to systems failing, expert Anuj Agarwal told NDTV Profit in a telephonic conversation on Friday.

Microsoft Inc. reported an outage in its cloud services early on Friday after the first instances appeared in the US on Thursday night. The glitches, attributed to the failure of Microsoft services including Azure and 365, affected life from the US to Asia.

Major cloud providers like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft typically conduct proper testing when planning updates, Agarwal said. However, there might be a deeper underlying issue, possibly related to the ongoing global crisis, he said.

It's becoming increasingly common to experience frequent outages every quarter, said Agarwal. "Each time, they attribute it to technical issues or other reasons."

The cyber expert advised that the cloud provider should consider utilising a rollback strategy. “It will be desirable for them to go immediately and roll back whatever changes they have made. That wouldn’t take much time.”

According to Sanchit Vir Gogia, founder and chief executive officer at Greyhound Research, any incident of this nature has an immediate impact on business and potential cybersecurity threats that could extend over several months.

"Given how this product works across cloud environments, the impact is bigger than a typical outage at a single cloud service provider," he said.

Gogia also emphasised that, considering the product's operation across various cloud environments, the impact is bigger than a typical outage at a single cloud service provider.