John Paul M. Joaquin Tech 12.02.2022 23:Dec PM EST

Rackspace Technology Still Investigating Cause of ‘System Disruption’

Rackspace has yet to determine what is causing its still active outage.

The American cloud computing services provider revealed that it is still investigating what's behind the "service disruption" it is experiencing, which resulted in connectivity issues and still affecting hosted environments, per Bleeping Computer.

The outage had been going on for 12 hours; the company may have acknowledged its existence some hours after it happened.

Rackspace Outage Details

Rackspace said in its announcement on Twitter on Dec. 2 that it became aware of the situation regarding its cloud computing services at 10:30 AM EST and that it is working to resolve the issue as soon as possible.

According to the company's status page, its Hosted Exchange Environments are down and are severely affecting customers' ability to connect and log in to avail of Rackspace's services.

Interestingly, the company indicated in the issue's details that they first investigated what was causing the outage at 2:49 AM EST - almost eight hours before it mentioned the issue on Twitter.

Unfortunately, the company's engineers were unable to solve the issues even after almost four hours in an update sent as a reply to their earlier tweet.

It then sent another update through a tweet a few hours later, saying that it understands that the issue impacting its Hosted Exchange environments is greatly impacting its customers. It added that its highest priority is to resolve the issue as soon as it can.

The company did not give much information about the issue through its tweets and status updates on its website other than it is working on the issue to restore services as soon as possible and that they apologize for the inconvenience customers are experiencing.

Many Twitter users became upset at the level of communication Rackspace gives its customers and the long wait time for it to fix the issue.

Jennifer Harris, a Public affairs strategist, said in a tweet that Rackspace's status updates were "ridiculous" due to them being not transparent enough for customers to know more about what's going on in the company.

Harris and Twitter users are not the only ones upset with Rackspace's handling of the issue. According to Fox Antonio, a substantial amount of small business owners worldwide are availing Rackspace's services, with the outage severely affecting their businesses.

What Is Rackspace Doing Now?

Unfortunately, Rackspace has yet to resolve the issue affecting its Hosted Exchange Environments as of the writing of this article, with the company calling it a "significant failure" rather than the earlier "system disruption." It decided to shut down the environment to avoid further issues while it works to restore service.

As a result, Rackspace is giving customers affected by the issue free access to Microsoft Exchange Plan licenses on Microsoft 365 until further notice. The company also gave instructions on how to set up their account and for their employees.

Customers' account administrators are required to manually set up each individual user on the former's account, with the whole process mostly taking up to 30 mins.

Those using a hybridized environment are required to move all their mailboxes to Microsoft 365 to have mail flow properly.