Rackspace Hosted Exchange Security Event

Beginning on December 2nd, 2022, Rackspace hosted Exchange experienced a major malfunction that lasted until the early morning of December 4th. When the incident first occurred, customer service from Rackspace did not provide any information about the issue or an estimate of when it would be fixed. People tweeting about their experiences displayed that the company was not responding to emails sent in for assistance. Through private messages on a social media platform, one customer of Rackspace detailed the full extent of the problem they experienced; they had been cut off from using their hosted exchange services for 16 hours and emails sent in did not come with an immediate "554 long delay" bounce. On December 3rd, Rackspace hosted Exchange experienced a security incident that forced them to take proactive measures and shut down their environment. It wasn't until a day later (1:57 AM) that they announced they were still troubleshooting. To remedy the situation, they offered their customers free Microsoft Exchange Plan 1 licenses on Microsoft 365 until they were able to restore normal service. The guidance they gave was that "there was a major incident in our Hosted Exchange system and we acted quickly to protect it from any further damage while we work on restoring it". There was a security event which had two major vulnerabilities that were resolved in November 2022. The current Rackspace outage update did not give details on the issue solely the fact that it was a security issue. As of the fourth of December, the service continues to be down and customers are being recommended to move to the Microsoft 365 service. Details remain unclear whether any customer data was impacted by the security event or if it had any effect on the service. As of now, there is no suggestion that customer information was put in danger.

(source: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/rackspace-hosted-exchange-outage-due-to-security-incident/473062/)