Microsoft employees hacked; Azure cloud service inaccessible
It was a rough Friday for Microsoft, which suffered a major outage with its Azure cloud-storage service and revealed that it too was a victim of a large hack that hit big tech companies this week.
The Redmond, Wash., tech company said some of its employees’ computers were breached as part of a hack that affected Facebook and Apple in a similar way.
“During our investigation, we found a small number of computers, including some in our Mac business unit, that were infected by malicious software using techniques similar to those documented by other organizations,” Microsoft said in a statement Friday afternoon.
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The company said it does not believe any user data was stolen.
Separately, Microsoft said user data on another service became inaccessible Friday because of technical issues.
Microsoft said that its Windows Azure cloud computing platform, which is used by programmers, was down because of a “worldwide outage” caused by an expired security certificate. That expired certificate prevents users from accessing the service using a secure protocol.
“We are validating the recovery options before implementing them,” Microsoft said on a Web page with information regarding Azure’s status. “Further updates will be published to keep you apprised of the situation. We apologize for any inconvenience this causes our customers.”
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