Microsoft has reported that service disruptions to its office suite and cloud services June 5 were the result of a denial of service attack.

BOSTON (NEWSnet/AP) — Sporadic but serious service disruptions plagued Microsoft's office suite — including the Outlook email and OneDrive file-sharing apps — and its cloud computing platform in early June.

A shadowy hacktivist group claimed responsibility, saying it flooded the sites with junk traffic in distributed denial-of-service attacks; and Microsoft has now disclosed that DDoS attacks by the upstart were indeed to blame.

Microsoft’s explanation came via a blog post Friday evening.

Slim on details, the post said the attacks “temporarily impacted availability” of some services. It said the attackers were focused on “disruption and publicity” and likely used rented cloud infrastructure and virtual private networks to bombard servers.

While DDoS attacks are mainly a nuisance — making websites unreachable without penetrating them — security experts say they can disrupt work if they successfully interrupt services.

Microsoft dubbed the attackers Storm-1359, using a designator it assigns to groups whose affiliation it has not yet established. Cybersecurity sleuthing tends to take time, and can be a challenge.

Serious impacts from the Microsoft 365 office suite interruptions were reported on June 5, peaking at 18,000 outage and problem reports on the tracker Downdetector shortly after 11 a.m. Eastern time. On Twitter that day, Microsoft said Outlook, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business were affected.

Attacks continued through the week, with Microsoft confirming on June 9 that its Azure cloud computing platform had been affected.

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Original article: https://www.newsnetmedia.com/story/49091656/microsoft-says-early-june-disruptions-to-outlook-cloud-were-cyberattacks