Rackspace Email Security Incident

MVP Communication:

We have been updated from Rackspace and there is some new optimism that the historical data in their Exchange Server environment my be recoverable. In the meantime, MVP will continue to work and try and recover from local saved folders for partners that have such instances. MVP looks forward to hearing progress from Rackspace and will adjust accordingly once data is made available.

Rackspace Update: https://status.apps.rackspace.com/index/viewincidents?group=2

12/18/22 Rackspace:

We understand how important data recovery is to our customers, and we want to provide you with information on what Rackspace has been doing behind the scenes to prepare for the customer data recovery process, which we expect to start soon.


12/7/2022 – 09:00 AM

Rackspace Update as of 8:26 am 12/7/2022: “We appreciate your patience as we continue to work through the security issues that have affected our Hosted Exchange environment. As you know, on Friday, December 2nd, 2022, we became aware of suspicious activity and immediately took proactive measures to isolate the Hosted Exchange environment to contain the incident. We have since determined this suspicious activity was the result of a ransomware incident.”

Alongside our internal security team, we have engaged a leading cyber defense firm to investigate. Our investigation is still in its early stages, and it is too early to say what, if any, data was affected. If we determine sensitive information was affected, we will notify customers as appropriate

MVP Update: In layman’s terms, Rackspace is in negotiations with their attackers to try and recover their data. There is no guarantee this will happen, even though we are hopeful your data will be recovered. There is no timeline for recovery of the data. Until Rackspace recovers, MVP is creating M365 Mail functionality for our partners that are affected. Mail in and out working correctly is our first step.

Once there is a final disposition on the Ransomware attack affecting Rackspace, we will be able to deliver you communication on next steps and what the options are for you. Often, these incidents can take a substantial amount of time to negotiate.

Until then, please use this daily briefing as an informational source.

Our full team is dedicated at this time to creating active mail capabilities for our partners.

12/5/2022 – 12:00 PM

As you may be aware, MVP utilizes Rackspace Hosted Exchange email for some of our partners. Since Friday December 2nd, Rackspace has been fighting a security breach that affected their email system. We understand that this outage is a huge issue for our partners.

After speaking with Rackspace and finding out their plan of action (Click here for Rackspace status update), we have taken Rackspace’s recommendation and decided to migrate all our partners away from Rackspace into the Microsoft 365 ecosystem.

We are focusing on returning email functionality to all partners on the Microsoft platform as soon as possible. We have already reached out to all our partners that have been affected and we are in the process of migrating all email functionality to the Microsoft environment. We do have some limitations in the migration since we do not have any data available for migration yet.

This is what this migration looks like now until we can get the existing data:

  • No, unfortunately you cannot get email in your outlook at this time.
  • No, we do not have an ETA when that will be resolved. We are under Rackspace’s mercy at this point.
  • Yes, you will need to use the web browser to get your email at this time.
  • No, these new mailboxes do not contain your email prior to Friday.
  • No, we do not have an ETA yet of when the data will be restored.
  • You are on the 365 platform separate from Rackspace

We will communicate again when we have more information about mail migration/restoration. Meanwhile, you will be receiving calls from our team to make sure you know how to start using your Microsoft email.

MVP is dedicated to restoring your email services while we work on getting your data imported into the Microsoft 365 ecosystem.

If you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact us directly at any time.

Thank you for your understanding and for your patience during this unfortunate event.

Your MVP Team