Microsoft reveals more on recent security hiccups

Remember that big outage that happened last week to Azure, Office 365 and Dynamic users? Well, Microsoft has shed some more light on what the underlying causes were. Publicly releasing root causes to the issue, Microsoft said there were three separate problems that led to the downtime. The first two occurred after a code update, which Microsoft rolled out by Friday, November 16. Those were latency issues in Microsoft Azure Active Directory Multi-Factor Authentication Service's (MFA) front-end's communication to its cache services. The second one was a race condition in processing responses from the MFA back-end server, while the third one came as a result of the second issue. It manifested itself as the MFA back-end not being able to process any requests from the front-end, despite everything looking just fine on Microsoft's monitoring.