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Microsoft suffers DDOS attack on its DNS servers

Microsoft Azure and Office 365 suffered an outage yesterday that affected just about everything in their cloud:

Microsoft Corp. was hit by a massive cloud outage today that took most of its internet services offline.

Microsoft’s Azure cloud services, as well as Teams, Office 365, OneDrive, Skype, Xbox Live and Bing were all inaccessible due to the outage. Even the Azure Status page was reportedly taken offline.

The first reports of the outage emerged from users on Twitter, and were confirmed by the website DownDetector which showed that reports began flooding in at around 5 p.m. ET. It says it received thousands of notices from Xbox Live, Teams and Office users.

Microsoft 365’s Twitter status account posted another update at 6.35 p.m. ET saying that traffic was being rerouted to resilient DNS capabilities and that it was already “seeing an improvement in service availability.”

Today, Microsoft reported as a preliminary root cause "We are continuing to investigate the underlying cause for the DNS outage but we have observed that Microsoft DNS servers saw a spike in DNS traffic." In other words, it looks like they suffered a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack on their internal name servers. The final analysis will come out next Thursday.

This outage was like the familiar "collective amnesia" trope in sci-fi where suddenly none of the characters recognizes any of the others, though they retain their normal personalities and abilities. (See, e.g.Dollhouse and Buffy. Joss Whedon lurves this trope.) For example, The Daily Parker was still running, but no one could get to it because the mapping from www.thedailparker.com to the Microsoft App Service hosting it has to go through Microsoft's internal name servers.

I wonder if this was a DDOS attack from inside the house?

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