Help & Resource Center

Rackspace Email Outage - July 2017

Rackspace Email

We know you rely on your email and it can be very difficult to run your business without it.  Because of this Modern Retail has picked Rackspace Email over many other vendors.  This decision has served us and our clients well over the past decade as Rackspace's email services have been extremely dependable.  Unfortunately, this is not the case this week as they've struggled to get their email working consistently.

Rackspace Email Status

While Modern Retail is always here to help you, you can check the status of your email at Rackspace by visiting the following website:

As you can see Rackspace has really been struggling this week.

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Rackspace Outage Response

Below is Rackspace reply regarding this week's outage.  Hopefully, your email will be back to normal on Monday.

We are truly sorry for the pain this has caused for you and your clients.  Communication around this incident could have certainly been better - trust that we are doing everything possible to ensure any incident in the future is handled in a better fashion.

While we do not have all of the answers for you at this time, I'll provide you with some insight in hopes that it gives you a better understanding of the overall issue. 

We started receiving isolated reports of these issues during the last few weeks, and in an effort to alleviate these symptoms we doubled our infrastructure's capacity.  Unfortunately, this resulted in all users reporting increased amounts of these symptoms all at once, and subsequently debilitating server load. We began this maintenance on Wednesday night in an effort to interrupt the smallest amount of traffic possible, and did not anticipate this effect at all.

This amount of downtime is unprecedented for us and we are making no excuses. We made a mistake and we are learning from it. Though we cannot give you a definite ETA, we can tell you that our engineers are working all hands on deck to resolve this issue and are reporting that we should be seeing marked improvement by Monday. At this time, there is no loss in data and incoming mail will all eventually deliver so long as the sender did not receive a bounce back. We are expecting a full recovery here and sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this has caused.

Once the incident has fully closed, we'll have a complete incident report available for you that will include much more detail. 

In the meantime, our support team will work to fix any isolated reports of users that may not be seeing any relief with these symptoms. Please note that connectivity issues, such as in local clients like Outlook, as well as webmail may still continue to be ongoing, but we are anticipating the issue to be growing better as time passes. Webmail is an alternative option for you to use currently; although it too is impacted, it may have more stability than local clients.

I hope this helps.  Please let us know if you have any other questions around this and we'll do our best to address them.