• by Ray Schultz , September 19, 2019

Email security and resilience firm Mimecast is contending with a service outage affecting users in parts of the U.S.

The problem started at roughly 10:45 Thursday morning ET. Of the complaints coming in to downdetector, 64% have been for email. 

Mimecast has acknowledged the issue, saying: “Mimecast can confirm that we are investigating a service disruption that may result in messages being deferred by our MTAs for US-hosted customers,” according to Computer Business Review.

It adds that “customers may intermittently not be able to access Mimecast applications or links protected by our Web Security or TTP services.  We are continuing to investigate and will post further updates here.”

According to Computer Business Review, a later post from Mimecast, states: “While email traffic is being processed, customers are likely to see messages being deferred by the Mimecast MTA’s [message transfer agents], and our applications and services may be intermittently unavailable.  We apologize for the inconvenience and are working to resolve this behavior.”

The outage affected users on the East Coast and in the Chicago area, in Southern California and the Pacific Northwest. 

One user writes: “If you're using URL rewrite, it is not even possible to open links in emails currently. Rewritten URL's will not resolve and with no access to the admin console, it is not possible to decode them."

However, another user says: “We are using URL rewrite but have not had any issues with that part of Mimecast. Just an FYI.” 

One post on downdetector, adds: “Inbound queue alerts starting at 11 am EDT. Unable to login to portal..”