© Reuters. FILE PHOTO: The Microsoft sign is seen atop the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles, California, US on October 19, 2018. Photograph: Mike Blake/Reuters
(Reuters) – Microsoft said on Friday that outages that affected certain of the company’s services during some days earlier this month were the result of cyberattacks, but said it saw no evidence of any customer data being accessed or compromised.
“Beginning in early June 2023, Microsoft has identified an increase in traffic for certain services that temporarily affected availability,” the company said in a blog post.
Microsoft said it opened an investigation and began tracking DDoS activity by the threat actor it refers to as Storm-1359 after it identified the threat.
Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request from Reuters about whether the company had identified the party responsible for the attack.
DDoS attacks work by directing large amounts of internet traffic toward target servers in a relatively unsophisticated attempt to stop it.
The Microsoft 365 suite of programs, including Teams and Outlook, was down for more than two hours to more than a thousand users on June 5 and a short repeat the next morning. This was Microsoft’s fourth such outage in a year.