Microsoft customers should not expect any security protocols between September 2nd and September 19th. Security logs contain important information for administrators about what is happening on the network.

When it comes to security, Microsoft hasn’t done a great job either. In early October, it sent out an annoying notice to Azure customers that security protocols would be unavailable for a period of two weeks. The affected products are Microsoft Entra, Sentinel, Defender for Cloud and Purview, writes Business Insider.

Microsoft emphasizes in the statement that this is not a security incident, but an internal bug. “A bug in one of the internal monitoring agents resulted in some agents being unable to upload log data to our internal logging platform,” Microsoft said. Therefore, no logs are available for the period from September 2nd to September 19th.

Abundance of information

The error would have only affected the collection of log data and would not have affected the operation of the affected services. Little consolation for network administrators. Security logs contain important information about what is happening on a network.

Security logs allow administrators to look for possible suspicious activity or identify access issues for people within the organization. This valuable treasure trove of information has no longer been available to Microsoft customers for two weeks.

A donkey and a stone

Such incidents are equally annoying for Microsoft. The company faced heavy criticism last year after a large-scale hacker attack on Exchange servers. One of the many criticisms of Microsoft’s handling of this incident was that the company only offered security protocols to customers with the most expensive Enterprise plans. As a result, many affected organizations did not realize that something was wrong with their network.

Microsoft responded by making security logs now available to all Azure subscriptions, assuming of course that the internal logging system is working. A few months ago, CEO Brad Smith promised under oath that Microsoft would do better and make security an “absolute priority.” Costly mistakes like this break that promise.