Microsoft says that a cyberattack triggered the hours-long outage impacting Azure customers

Microsoft outage impacting customers worldwide Tech expert Carmi Levy explains how Microsoft customers can protect themselves against potential cyberattacks amid a global outage.

New York — A global Microsoft Azure outage that impacted a range of services for consumers Tuesday — from reports of stalling Outlook emails to trouble ordering on Starbucks’ mobile app — was triggered by distributed denial of service cyberattack, according to the tech giant.

Microsoft Azure, a cloud computing platform used by companies worldwide, confirmed the attack in a status update — and said that an error in the platform’s defense response may have “amplified the impact” rather than initially mitigating it.

As a result, systems temporarily went down for select customers in an hours-long disruption.