14 DAY TRIAL // A few days ago, users in select countries across the world reported issues when trying to access Microsoft services, with Redmond managing to repair the problems in just a few minutes.
While the company hasn’t provided any specifics on what happened at that time, it turns out that hacker group Anonymous was actually behind the outage.
Anonymous has sent a letter to Microsoft, claiming that Hotmail.com, microsoft.com, live.com, and msn.com went down a few days ago because of attacks launched as part of Operation KillingBay.
The hackers explained that the initial DDoS attack was supposed to take down Japanese Microsoft domains, but only a few targets have actually been affected.
“A couple days ago a DDoS attack was launched at Japanese Microsoft (Domain) Websites and Servers. We are sorry to report that the Japanese Microsoft Websites and Servers did not go down as planned. Although something did go down. We took the pretty much the entire Microsoft domains down,” Anonymous said in the letter.
“The DDoS attack was launched in response to Taiji...Operation KillingBay OR #OpKillingBay. Although We are sorry for any inconvenience We caused you Microsoft...It's the thought that counts right?”
While nobody except Microsoft can tell for sure whether Anonymous was indeed the group behind the outage, the company confirmed in a short statement that it received reports from users having problems when trying to access its websites.
“Microsoft can confirm that all online services have been restored. We are investigating the root cause of the disruption and will continue to keep customers updated as information becomes available,” the company said.
Problems experienced by Internet service providers or DNS servers that failed to respond to request initially seemed to be the cause of the downtime, so we’ve reached out to Microsoft for more information on this and we’ll update the article when we receive an answer.