Microsoft

Microsoft has admitted that the global, nearly five-hour, failure in the company's network infrastructure was caused by an error made by network engineers when making configuration changes to WAN routers.

"The service failure incident was caused by changing the IP address of the WAN routers using a command that has not been thoroughly tested and behaves differently on different network devices," Microsoft explained.

The company assured that the changes to router configurations were made by network engineers as part of planned work to update the IP addresses on the WAN routers.