Security News
An ongoing outage affects multiple Microsoft 365 services, with customers worldwide reporting delays, sign-in failures, and issues accessing their accounts. The affected services include the Exchange Online hosted email platform for businesses and the Microsoft Teams communication platform, as well as SharePoint Online, the Graph API, and Universal Print.
As the company's Chief Technology Officer Sri Viswanath revealed on April 14th, nine days after the incident started, a maintenance script accidentally wiped hundreds of customer sites due to communication issues between two Atlassian teams working on deactivating a legacy app. The 14-day-long outage impacted a very small set of Atlassian customers between April 5th and April 18th. The first set of impacted sites was restored until April 8th and the rest of the affected customer sites by April 18th. During the incident, the following Atlassian products have been unavailable for impacted customers: the entire Jira family of products, Confluence, Atlassian Access, Opsgenie, and Statuspage.
Atlassian has finally revealed the exact cause of an ongoing cloud services outage the company estimates could impact some of its customers for up to two more weeks. When we first reported on this outage, Atlassian told us that a routine maintenance script blocked some customers' access to their data after "Unintentionally" disabled the sites of roughly 400 out of its over 200,000 customers.
Atlassian, a UK-based company making software development and collaboration tools, estimates it might take two more weeks to restore all customer instances impacted by a week-long ongoing outage affecting its cloud services. While the impact on businesses using its products is undeniable, Atlassian said only around 400 of its more than 200,000 customers are affected.
An ongoing outage affects numerous Atlassian customers, causing their Jira and Confluence instances to not be accessible for over twenty-four hours. The outage started at approximately 5 AM EST yesterday, with Jira and Confluence customers no longer able to access their cloud instances.
The payment services giant advises that some users may continue to experience issues online or over the phone. The issues reported by users included being unable to log in to their Amex accounts, make payments, or get to an Amex customer service representative over the phone.
Tens of thousands of Viasat satellite broadband modems that were disabled in a cyber-attack some weeks ago were wiped by malware with possible links to Russia's destructive VPNFilter, according to SentinelOne. In a statement, Viasat said the researchers' hypothesis was "Consistent with the facts in our report ... SentinelLabs identifies the destructive executable that was run on the modems using a legitimate management command as Viasat previously described."
Russia's RSPP Commission for Communications and IT, the country's largest entrepreneurship union, has warned of imminent large-scale service Internet service outages due to the lack of available telecom equipment. With the western equipment suppliers exiting the market and not selling parts to Russian entities anymore, the first notable service outages may start as early as this summer.
GitHub says recent service outages were caused by resource contention issues in their primary database cluster. Since last week, GitHub says that there were four service outages caused by these problems, on March 16th, March 17th, March 22nd, and March 23rd. Today, GitHub explained that these outages were caused by "Resource contention" issues with their primary MySQL cluster called 'MySQL1.
Edinburgh's Heriot-Watt University has entered a second week of woe following a vist by an infosec nasty. The 200-year-old institution's IT team first referred to the crisis as a "Security incident" but a spokesperson confirmed to The Register that it was a cyber attack.