Rackspace experienced what it called a “security incident” on its hosted Microsoft Exchange platform, forcing it to shut down the service over the weekend.
The problem was fixed early Monday morning.
“On Friday, December 2, 2022, we became aware of a problem with our Hosted Exchange environment. We proactively shut down and disconnected the Hosted Exchange environment while trying to understand the magnitude and severity of the impact. After further analysis, we have determined that this is a security incident,” the company said in its report (opens in new tab).
Significant failure
After further analysis, Rackspace said the incident was a “significant outage in our Hosted Exchange environment” but also “isolated to part of our Hosted Exchange platform.” It manifested as “connectivity and login issues”. At first, it wasn’t sure how long it would take to fix the problem, but it turned out the company was busy for most of the weekend. The latest update, published Monday at 01:28 AM EST, says the issue has been partially resolved:
“We have successfully restored email services (opens in new tab) to thousands of customers on Microsoft 365 and we continue to make progress in restoring email service for each affected customer,” the company said.
Rackspace did not say what caused the incident, but the time it took to restore services could suggest ransomware. During the outage, the company offered affected customers free access to Microsoft Exchange Plan 1 licenses on Microsoft 365 while it works to resolve the issue.
Some customers were dissatisfied with the way the company handled the issue and provided very little communication or customer support, while some were left waiting on the phone for hours.
“Currently, moving to Microsoft 365 is the best solution for customers who can now also implement transient forwarding,” Rackspace’s announcement concludes. More details about this can be found at this link (opens in new tab).
Through: The register (opens in new tab)