I’ve you’ve been following along, Friday Rackspace experienced a major disruption for their Hosted Exchange environment.  Why exactly you’d still be using hosted exchange vs moving over to M365 I’m not sure, especially after Exchange has become such a major target for zero-day and ransomware attacks, but there were a lot of folks that still were and they’re hating life about now.  Rumor’s I’ve heard indicate that their Exchange servers were not fully patched and malware has taken down the environment. Rackspace as indicated that the outage was caused by a “security incident”.

To give a bit if idea just how bad it is, Rackspace is paying for it’s clients to utilize complimentary M365 Exchange Plan 1 licenses to get email up and flowing again, with the intention of moving back after this has been resolved, but I’m guessing most folks will not be moving back - I wouldn’t anyway.  Rackspace actually took the hosted Exchange environment offline to try which sounds like ransomware and an attempt to mitigate the spread. 

And their stock is pretty well plummeting today…I’m not sure if this would be something they’d recover from or not...seems like something like this would be a pretty big hit to your reputation and bottom line.

It’s pretty amazing how many MSP’s and/or customers are talking about “hoping” that they don’t lose all of their data, etc.  Meaning, they don’t have any backups or have very outdated backups…    Anyhow, morale of the story, backup your cloud (and all) workloads!  Oh...and keep patching!

News:

https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2022/12/05/rackspace-hosted-exchange-service-outage/

https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/05/rackspace_hosted_exchange_security_update/

https://doublepulsar.com/rackspace-cloud-office-suffers-security-breach-958e6c755d7f

User Reports and Discussions:

https://www.reddit.com/r/msp/comments/zbj69z/rackspace_hosted_exchange_disruption/

https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/zarfdr/rackspace_hosted_exchange_outage/

https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/zao4yi/is_ms_exchange_or_rackspace_down/

https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/zbt39z/rackspace_hold_times_and_lessons_learned/