The Rackspace email system comprising hosted Exchange Servers went down in the early morning of December 2, 2023. After some time, the users started reporting that the services were not running. All hosted Exchange Server clients went down without access to the service or emails in their online mailboxes. The problem got even bigger when the incoming emails were bouncing back, and clients or recipients were getting the Non-Delivery Report (NDR) messages after several hours.
Dated Tuesday December 8th 2023, this is the present system status from rackspace technology:
Read more about the status update of Rackspace Hostage exchange Outage in detail: Source
The official message from Rackspace on their status page offered some insight into what’s going on, but there was little information on exactly what’s the issue.
“We are investigating an issue that is affecting our Hosted Exchange environments. More details will be posted as they become available.”
Source from Rackspace
After a while, the following message was seen as an update on the matter, where they announced that the problem was escalated and entered the investigation stage.
“We are investigating reports of connectivity issues to our Exchange environments.
Users may experience an error upon accessing the Outlook Web App (Webmail) and syncing their email client(s).”
However customer who had previously subscribed for archive services could restore the lost mailbox data from their archives.
Source from Rackspace
At this stage, the clients are still stranded with no access to their current mailboxes and are not able to send/receive emails.
Rackspace hasn’t released the exact details of the security event. However, such security events generally involve a vulnerability. Currently, there are two grave vulnerabilities on Exchange Server.
CVE-2023-41040
Microsoft Exchange Server Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) Vulnerability. A Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) attack allows a hacker to read and change data on the server.
CVE-2023-41082
Microsoft Exchange Server Remote Code Execution Vulnerability. A Remote Code Execution Vulnerability is one in which an attacker can run malicious code on a server.
Source from Bleeping computing
How to Restore Services and Mailbox Data?
As a workaround, Rackspace is offering Microsoft Exchange Online Plan 1 licenses on Microsoft Office 365 platform. This is the only way forward since there is no estimated time (ETA) to fix the issue from there end.
Below is the official message from Rackspace:
“We experienced a significant failure in our Hosted Exchange environment. We proactively shut down the environment to avoid any further issues while we continue work to restore service. As we continue to work through the root cause of the issue, we have an alternate solution that will re-activate your ability to send and receive emails.
At no cost to you, we will be providing you access to Microsoft Exchange Plan 1 licenses on Microsoft 365 until further notice.”
Source from Rackspace
This will solve the problem of sending and receiving emails. Any email data will be lost, if the users were using webmail only. If the clients were using Outlook to access their emails, there is a chance to recover the data. Since Outlook caches emails locally, you can extract and convert the data from local cache (OST file) into PST file and then import it into the new Office 365 platform. Here are the methods you can follow to recover the data.
Method 1 – Using Outlook
You can export the mailbox data to PST file if Outlook is accessible by the client computer. After that, you can import the PST file into the Exchange Online (Microsoft 365) profile. Depending on the amount of data and size of the PST file, this may take some time. However, this method is not recommended if the mailbox or PST file is large as it may lead to Outlook crashing.
Method 2 – Using Stellar Converter for OST
The best way to recover data from OST file and convert it into PST file is by using an advanced OST to PST converter tool, such as Stellar Converter for OST. You can copy all the OST files to a location, open them, and convert them to PST files with minimal processing needs and with complete data integrity. You can also directly export OST files to Office 365 with Stellar Converter for OST Technician edition. There is no limit on size of the OST file.
Learn More, How do you find the location of the OST file?
Conclusion
Since December 2, 2023, the Rackspace hosted Exchange outage issue has affected thousands of customers. There is no official statement from Rackspace at this stage regarding the actual cause of the issue. There is no way to know exactly what went wrong and what the extent of damage is, and when the services will be restored. There is also uncertainty about the safety of customers’ data. However, as a temporary solution, Rackspace is providing its customers with Microsoft Exchange Online Plan 1 licenses on Microsoft Office 365 platform at no cost to restore email services.
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