Following a four-day outage of its Hosted Microsoft Exchange service, managed cloud provider Rackspace now says it has determined that it was caused by a ransomware attack.
The ransomware outage which started on Saturday New Zealand time saw Rackspace shutting down its entire Hosted Exchange service as it investigated the issue.
Thousands of customers were asked to migrate to Microsoft 365, with Rackspace providing free Exchange Plan 1 licenses for them.
No details were provided on which type of ransomware was used for the attack on Rackspace, and whether or not customer data was encrypted and subject to extortion.
UPDATE: Since becoming aware of suspicious activity in our Hosted Exchange environment on 12/2, we’ve determined that the isolated disruption is the result of ransomware and our security team is working with a lead cyber defense firm to investigate. Status:https://t.co/Uz0k8GL7Sg
— Rackspace Technology (@Rackspace) December 6, 2022
Rackspace did not provide an estimated time of service restoration for its Hosted Exchange business, but added that it believed its other offerings were not affected by ransomware.
The company said the ransomware incident may continue to cause interruption for its Hosted Exchange service, and could result in a loss of revenue for Rackspace.
Hosted Exchange brought in US$30 million a year for Rackspace, in its Apps and Cross Platform segment.
California-based law firm Cole & Van Note announced that it had filed a class action lawsuit for negligence due to the ransomware attack, alleging vulnerabilities in the Rackspace environment going back over a year, and a seeming lack of backup protocols.
In May this year, Rackspace chief executive Kevin Jones said the cloud provider was considering selling off unspecified parts of its business.
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