SEATTLE, Wash. (AP) — A week of Internet turmoil continued Friday for Microsoft Corp. as its main site became nearly inaccessible to users.
The traffic jams are the latest in a series of disruptions that have plagued Microsoft. com since the beginning of the week.
It wasn’t clear if the incident was a denial-of-service attack, but it was something other than disruptions that Microsoft had attributed in the past to a technical problem, said Daniel Todd, lead application technologist at Internet measurement company Keynote Systems Inc.
A denial-of-service attack floods a formula with so much knowledge that valid traffic is slowed down or interrupted.
“To a user, it will look similar since they can’t download the page from the Internet,” Todd said.
Around 10 a. m. PT, only 7% of web users were able to access the site, Todd said, adding that the scenario continues an hour later. Only Microsoft can verify whether it’s a denial-of-service attack, he said. saying.
Microsoft said on Thursday that hacker attacks had hit some of its websites, and the software giant fell victim to the same type of attack that brought down other web giants last year.
Microsoft said one or more hackers targeted some routers, the device that directs users to a site, in a denial-of-service attack.
But the Redmond, Washington-based company said the attack was separated from an accidental outage of several of its websites, including its main corporate site and MSN. com portal, between Tuesday night and Wednesday night.
“It is unfortunate that an individual or organization of Americans would have interaction in this type of illegal activity,” Microsoft said in a statement.
“We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused our consumers and must assure them that we will take further steps in the coming days and weeks to increase them,” Microsoft said.
Microsoft said the sites were up and running and that it had notified the FBI.
A spokesperson for the company declined to comment, saying it’s now a compliance issue.
The FBI announced Friday that it was investigating the attack.
“(Microsoft) contacted us yesterday and yes, we have an ongoing investigation,” said Mike Sanders, a spokesman for the FBI’s Seattle box office. He declined to comment further.
Denial-of-service attacks went from a hard-to-understand hacker culture to the headlines of last year, when the Internet sites of the online auction space eBay, the Internet store Amazon. com and Yahoo!they were knocked down by such obstacles.
A Canadian teenager nicknamed “Mafiaboy” pleaded guilty this month to 56 charges similar to the attacks, which estimated $1. 7 billion in damages and raised concerns about the vulnerability of businesses and consumers online.
The attack on Microsoft won’t be the last.
“I can almost guarantee that this will happen again,” said Amit Yoran, chief executive of data security firm Riptech Inc. “We don’t know when the next denial-of-service attacks will take place, but we do know that they are forthcoming. “
The security network would want more knowledge from Microsoft about the attack before judging how hackers can bring the company’s entire web empire to its knees so easily, Yoran said.
“I guess Microsoft has a pretty giant infrastructure. Microsoft has a top-notch security team, so it’s probably not something they overlooked, but it’s something that wasn’t well known,” Yoran said.
Whether or not Thursday’s attack was due to security team errors or a cunning hacker is the latest embarrassing incident for the world’s largest software company.
In October, a hacker accessed an unattended Microsoft computer and scoured the formula for days, stealing some code from an unidentified product in development.
The technical issues Microsoft experienced earlier this week are also one of the most significant online page outages in weeks. Earlier this month, eBay crashed for about 11 hours due to formula disruptions, and in December, Amazon was briefly several times below the peak. holiday shopping season.
Microsoft blamed the past outages on a technician who had made an “erroneous configuration change” to the computers that Internet users visited the sites.
Microsoft had this consistent on Wednesday night, but as of Thursday morning many sites were inaccessible again.
Users and web tracking companies have reported difficulties accessing several Microsoft sites, including MSN, its Expedia site, and the free email service Hotmail.
Other Microsoft affected include news site MSNBC. com, car-buying service Carpoint, home-buying service Homeadvisor and entertainment guide Windowsmedia.
Daniel Sieberg, generation editor at CNN. com, and Reuters contributed to this report.