Rackspace: Ongoing Exchange outage caused by security incident

American cloud computing services provider Rackspace says an ongoing outage affecting its hosted Microsoft Exchange environments and likely thousands of customers was caused by a security incident.

The list of impacted services includes MAPI/RPC, POP, IMAP, SMTP, ActiveSync, and the Outlook Web Access (OWA) interface used to access the Hosted Exchange instance to manage email online.

"We are investigating an issue that is affecting our Hosted Exchange environments. More details will be posted as they become available," Rackspace said on Friday night, at 02:49 AM EST, when it acknowledged the outage.

More than 15 hours later and multiple updates without any info on what is causing what it describes as a "system disruption," the company said it's "aware of an issue impacting" Hosted Exchange environments and that its engineering teams continue to work "to come to a resolution."

Affected customers were advised to check the status page for the latest updates, even though those are also lacking details about the outage's root cause. 

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