Could the Microsoft 365 Cloud outage been caused by Cybercriminals?

GovInfoSecurity.com reported “Microsoft blamed an internal network configuration change for a series of outages that disrupted access globally to its Azure cloud services, including Outlook and Microsoft Teams.”  The January 25, 2023 report entitled “Microsoft 365 Cloud Service Outage Disrupts Users Worldwide” (https://www.govinfosecurity.com/microsoft-365-cloud-service-outage-disrupts-users-worldwide-a-21017?rf=2023-01-28__SUB_GIS__Slot1_ART21017&mkt_tok=MDUxLVpYSS0yMzcAAAGJl_kLevgVv1V850OJ1cglsGe7zatnoYKhKSTm-AnAu59rag2HIB07lsa8fyim7X2GeZJd5LM_hAzSxaL1KkYiUq8pRFtoSynA5yIaVkquHcdb_y3HRA) included these comments:

 Any user serviced by the affected infrastructure may be unable to access multiple Microsoft 365 services," Microsoft warned Wednesday morning in a Microsoft 365 service degradation alert.

The outage affected a wide range of services, including SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business. Other affected services included Microsoft 365 admin portal and Microsoft Intune endpoint management, as well as Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, Identity and Endpoint. Microsoft said the problem didn't just affect direct access to its services but also how information was flowing between its data centers.

The Downdetector website, which crowdsources reports of service outages, said reports of disruptions began to surge around 7:00 a.m. UTC. Also affected were consumer-focused services such as Minecraft and Xbox Live.

Microsoft, around 08:00 a.m. UTC, first confirmed outage reports and said it appeared to have identified the problem, which it described as "a wide-area networking routing change." That description suggests that the networking change triggered domain name system disruptions.

Could Cybercriminals been involved? What do you think?

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