All About Interwebz: Rackspace customers are still being affected by Microsoft Exchange issue

An outage impacting cloud computing provider Rackspace has now been impacting users for over three weeks, reports have claimed.

The November 2022 cyber incident - later confirmed as a ransomware attack - stopped many of the company's customers from accessing their Outlook Web App and syncing their email clients.

Rackspace is yet to clarify the exact number of consumers impacted by the recent attack on its Microsoft Exchange email hosting service, but it was able to say in an SEC filing that the number represented around 1% of its overall revenue, about $30 million, and the impact was primarily felt among small business users.

So, whats next for the impacted customers?

Rackspace's Chief Product Officer Josh Prewitt was clear that some progress is being made in allowing customers to access their locked data, saying that he "would expect that we've made tremendous progress within the next few days to one week".

However, it’s still not entirely clear if users are set to get 100% of their data back, with the exec saying it would be “premature for me to say absolutely every single customer, 100 percent”, adding that there is "a chance that an Exchange PST file could be a corrupt file, there's a chance there would be something wrong with an individual customer's PST".

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However, he was able to say that he “strongly believes” that the vast majority of customers get their data back.

The exec also said that Rackspace will eventually share more details about the incident, including the root cause and how the firm tried to remedy it.

In addition, the company declined to comment on the ongoing class-action lawsuit, where impacted customers in 18 states are attempting to gain compensation from the company.

Rackspace has already begun offering some types of compensation to users impacted by the incident

The compensation included offering Microsoft 365 Exchange Plan 1 licenses to affected users free of charge until a fix would be determined.