On August 5th, Microsoft experienced another outage in its Azure cloud, affecting several services for customers in North and Latin America, as reported by BleepingComputer. The problems began around 18:22 UTC and were linked to a “configuration change” in the Azure Front Door (AFD) cloud CDN service.
Impact and Mitigation
According to Microsoft, the incident caused issues for customers using Azure services, including Azure DevOps, particularly in the UK and Brazil. Downdetector received thousands of user reports of problems connecting to servers and logging in, though the Service Health Status page did not indicate any issues with Azure throughout the outage. Microsoft stated that they had “rolled back the change,” and by 19:25 UTC (22:25 Moscow time), most services were recovering.
Lessons Learned and Moving Forward
Last week, Microsoft experienced a longer outage that was caused by a DDoS attack targeting multiple Azure Front Door and CDN sites, reminds NIXSOLUTIONS. The company acknowledged that the initial trigger event was a DDoS attack, but an error in their mitigation implementation amplified the impact rather than mitigating it. This latest incident highlights the importance of thorough testing and robust mitigation strategies to ensure the reliability of cloud services.
As Microsoft continues to investigate the causes of these outages, we’ll keep you updated on the steps they are taking to enhance the stability and resilience of the Azure platform.