• by Ray Schultz , December 5, 2022

Rackspace says it has partially resolved a hosted exchange disruption caused by a security breach. But frustrations remain.  

“ We have successfully restored email services to thousands of customers on Microsoft 365 and continue to make progress on restoring email service to every affected customer,” the company states in an advisory.  

However, it advises users that moving to to a free Microsoft 365 account is the best solution if they have problems. 

“Set up  and configure accounts on Microsoft 365 to immediately begin sending and receiving mail,” it says. 

This apparently is not an easy process. Early Sunday morning, Rackspace reported: “Current wait times for customer support are much longer than usual. For those who are finding the process challenging and are awaiting support, we ask for your patience as we increase staff to help every customer."

In addition, the company predicts that this could be “an extended outage.” 

According to Help Net Security: “The connectivity issues for Rackspace Hosted Exchange customers – mostly small to medium size businesses – started on Friday (December 2), with users experiencing errors when accessing the Outlook Web App (Webmail) and syncing their email clients.” 

This report adds that it took “18 hours for Rackspace to realize that the problem will not be easily fixed and to decide to offer another option to disgruntled customers.”  

Meanwhile, The Register writes: “Many social media reports mention not being able to restore all inboxes after migration. And given that email is used to store way too many documents, the risk of leaks is very significant.”