Security News > 2022 > December > Rackspace confirms outage was caused by ransomware attack

Texas-based cloud computing provider Rackspace has confirmed today that a ransomware attack is behind its ongoing Hosted Exchange outage.
"Although Rackspace Technology is in the early stages of assessing this incident, the incident has caused and may continue to cause an interruption in its Hosted Exchange business and may result in a loss of revenue for the Hosted Exchange business, which generates approximately $30 million of annual revenue in the Apps & Cross Platform segment," the company said.
Rackspace's outage still affects all services in its Hosted Exchange environment, including MAPI/RPC, POP, IMAP, SMTP, and ActiveSync, as well as the Outlook Web Access interface that provides access to online email management.
Today's announcement comes four days after the company initially acknowledged the outage on its status page, on Friday night, at 02:49 AM EST. Rackspace revealed the actual cause of the outage twenty-four hours later, describing it as a security incident "Isolated to a portion of our Hosted Exchange platform" that forced it to shut down and disconnect the Hosted Exchange environment.
The company confirmed today some of its customer's concerns, who suspected, due to the limited information, that the outage might be the result of a malware or ransomware attack.
Starting Friday evening, Rackspace has been providing affected customers with Microsoft Exchange Plan 1 licenses and detailed instructions on how to migrate their email to Microsoft 365 until the outage is addressed.
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