Microsoft Says Azure Outage Began as DDoS Cyberattack

Microsoft Corp. said an outage of Azure cloud applications was triggered by a distributed-denial-of-service cyberattack.

The DDoS attack began early Tuesday and an error in Microsoft’s automated protection mechanisms worsened the impact rather than mitigating it, the company said in a status update.

Customers were affected in multiple regions, including services running on Azure. For example, mobile ordering at Starbucks Corp. was disabled for hours because of the issues affecting Azure, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Denial-of-service attacks direct internet traffic at a website in mass volume to disrupt it or shut it down. The incidents ...