Thousands of Rackspace customers globally continue to face Microsoft Exchange Server outages that the managed services giant says trace to a security incident.
Rackspace says it will keep its hosted Exchange service offline indefinitely while it investigates the specific problem, which it has not yet publicly identified.
Texas-based Rackspace is the world’s largest managed cloud provider, counting more than 300,000 customers worldwide, including two-thirds of the world’s 100 largest publicly traded businesses.
The problems began Thursday night, with Rackspace reporting Friday afternoon that it had “experienced a significant failure in our Hosted Exchange environment” and that it “proactively shut down the environment to avoid any further issues while we continue work to restore service” and identify “the root cause of the issue.” Subsequently, the company reported that the root cause involved an apparent attack.
Rackspace has recommended all affected customers move to Microsoft 365 as a temporary mitigation and says it is providing them with “Microsoft Exchange Plan 1 licenses on Microsoft 365 until further notice” at no additional cost.
Services affected by its Hosted Exchange offering that remain offline include MAPI/RPC, POP, IMAP, SMTP, ActiveSync and the Outlook Web Access interface used to access Hosted Exchange instances for managing email online.
