Rackspace outage: an exit plan for email
Thousands of businesses lost email after ransomware hit Rackspace’s hosted Exchange. Your provider’s outage is your outage.
On 2 December Rackspace’s hosted Exchange service went down. A few days later Rackspace confirmed ransomware, and it’s now moving customers to Microsoft 365 instead of restoring the old service. Thousands of small businesses lost email, some with no easy way to get their old messages back.
You outsource the server, not the consequences. Questions worth answering now:
- Do you control your domain’s DNS? If yes, you can point mail to a new provider in an hour. If your email host also controls DNS, you’re stuck with them.
- Do you have your own copy of mail? Regular exports, or a backup service for your mailboxes, kept outside the provider.
- Who else could host it tomorrow? Know the steps to move, even roughly.
- What does your contract promise about data recovery, not just uptime?
Most providers are fine most of the time. The plan is for the day one isn’t.