German cybersecurity officials investigate website ‘attack’ | World News

Germany is investigating a digital attack by hackers targeting the country’s websites.

Known as distributed denial-of-service (DDoS), these attacks work by directing massive amounts of internet traffic to targeted servers, which so-called hacktivists try to take offline.

“The scope and origin of these attacks are currently being ascertained,” Germany’s Interior Ministry said.

On the same day, Microsoft users all over the world experienced an outage.

Reuters reported earlier that German cybersecurity officials were investigating the Microsoft outage and looking for “culprits,” but later issued a correction that removed the reference to Microsoft.

The company did not say how many people were affected, but Downdetector.com, which tracks outages, recorded Thousands of people report issues Use Teams, Outlook, Microsoft 365, and XBox Live.

By late morning, Downdetector showed that the number of reports had dropped significantly.

Microsoft said it has identified network connectivity issues with devices passing through Microsoft’s WAN.

The company later tweeted that it had rolled back the network changes it believed caused the problem and was using “additional infrastructure to expedite the recovery process.”

The Microsoft 365 Status Twitter account reported: “We continue to monitor the recovery across the service, and some customers are reporting some easing.”

“We’re also connecting the service to other infrastructure to speed up the recovery process.”

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Reports of Teams outages were found in the UK, India, Japan, Australia, and the United Arab Emirates.

Many users were unable to exchange messages, join calls or use any functionality of the Teams app — forcing office workers to communicate in other ways.

More than 280 million people around the world use Teams, and it forms a vital part of the day-to-day operations of businesses and schools, using the service to make calls, schedule meetings, and organize workflow.

Microsoft Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business were also affected, according to the company’s status page.

Azure, the company’s cloud computing unit, also tweeted about the outage, saying some users were experiencing issues with the platform.

Azure, which has 15 million enterprise customers and more than 500 million active users, revealed on its status page that its services were affected globally.

The outage comes as Microsoft – which has more than 220,000 employees, including 6,000 in the UK – announced last week plans to produce 10,000 layoffs across its global operations.

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