Outlook.com and OneDrive down – consequence of cyber attacks? (June 8, 2023)

[German]Microsoft has been struggling with outages in its cloud services (Exchange Online, Outlook.com) for days. Now, as of June 8, 2023, Outlook.com and OneDrive services are down again (probably worldwide). May be technical in nature – but there is a nasty suspicion. A cyber group Anonymous Sudan claims to attack Microsoft and be responsible for the disruptions.

I had already reported on June 5, 2023 in my German blog post Exchange Online-Störung (5. Juni 2023) – Werk russischer Hacker? (Exchange Online disruption (June 5, 2023) – work of Russian hackers?) about a disruption of Exchange Online, which also affected Outlook. It was also mentioned there that the hacktivist group Anonymous Sudan claimed an attack on Microsoft's cloud infrastructure (via DDoS).

Service disruption June 8, 2023

I just took a look online and saw that the colleagues at Bleeping Computer are reporting OneDrive issues. OneDrive is said to be down or disrupted worldwide – although I can get onto my OneDrive test account.

The colleagues from Bleeping Computer write that affected users get the error message "Sorry, an error has occurred" or similar when trying to access OneDrive. So I went to the status page for Microsoft services (portal.office[.]servicestatus) and took the following screenshot.

Title: Users' contact lists are duplicated

User impact: Users' contact lists are duplicated.

More info: This issue only impacts users who synced their personal account device contacts with Microsoft Teams. New syncs are no longer resulting in duplicate contacts since we've implemented the long-term fix.

To remove the duplicate contacts created by this issue prior to the completion of our long-term cleanup process, affected users can use the workaround described here: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/all/workaround-for-outlookcom-users-experiencing/d58d75c2-76a9-4176-b907-333ddfa44952

We'd like to get your feedback on the workaround we provided. From a non-mobile device, please rate this post and submit it in the textbox.

Current status: We're continuing to work on the cleaning up process for the remaining duplicate contacts. Affected users can manually remove the duplicate contacts before our clean up process is complete by following the instructions in the above workaround article link.

Start time: Tuesday, March 28, 2023, at 12:00 PM UTC

Estimated time to resolve: We anticipate all of the duplicate contacts will be removed by the end of June 2023.

Next update by: Friday, June 9, 2023, at 6:00 AM UTC

Microsoft has a problem with it's cloud services on June 8 2023 – OneDrive, Outlook.com and Teams are out of order.

Was there an attack?

Colleagues from Bleeping Computer also mention the possible cyberattack by the hacktivist group Anonymous Sudan, who, according to this tweet, sent the following message. The group claims to be "in control of and able to disrupt" Microsoft's services.

Microsoft told Bleeping Computer: "We are aware of these allegations and are investigating them. We are taking the necessary steps to protect our customers and ensure the stability of our services."

I had also raised the question in an internal Facebook group as part of the Exchange Online disruption. The feedback there was that the Microsoft Security Operation Center (SOC) was actually proactively communicating such attacks – but there was silence there. With my current knowledge, I would classify the topic "Microsoft services thwarted by hacktivists" under "there's nothing to it".