WASHINGTON – The outages that affected certain Microsoft services on some days in early June were the result of cyber attacks. But the tech giant noted it saw no evidence of any customer data being accessed or compromised.

“Beginning in early June 2023, Microsoft identified surges in traffic against some services that temporarily impacted availability,“ the company said in a blog post.

Microsoft opened an investigation and began tracking the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) activity by the party it refers to as Storm-1359 after it identified the threat.

DDoS attacks work by directing high volumes of Internet traffic towards targeted servers in a relatively unsophisticated bid to knock them offline.

Microsoft’s 365 software suite, including Teams and Outlook, were down for more than two hours for over thousands of users on June 5 and a brief recurrence the following morning.

That was the fourth such outage for Microsoft in a year. REUTERS