Microsoft blames Azure Portal outage to spike in traffic

Significant network traffic increase has been cited by Microsoft as the preliminary root cause of the global outage of its Azure Portal on June 9, which also affected access to other Microsoft websites, according to BleepingComputer. "We identified a spike in network traffic which impacted the ability to manage traffic to these sites and resulted in the issues for customers to access these sites. We engaged in different workstreams applying load balancing processes in addition to the auto-recovery operations in place in order to mitigate the issue. Additionally, we are continuing to monitor the platform health," said Microsoft. Such a statement comes after the portal was claimed to have been subjected to a distributed denial-of-service attack by the Anonymous Sudan hacktivist operation, which also took credit for other DDoS attacks against OneDrive and Outlook.com during the past week, which also led to outages. Investigation into Anonymous Sudan's claims is underway, Microsoft noted.