Rackspace’s shares took a hit after the company suffered a ransomware attack hit and then failed to tell customers.
The outfit has been slammed on social media for its lack of transparency since customers started noticing a massive outage late last week.
It finally announced that it was suffering a “ransomware incident” affecting its hosted Exchange environment in its blog.
“Alongside the Rackspace Technology internal security team, the company has engaged a leading cyber defence firm to investigate”, the company said in the statement.
“Our investigation is still in its early stages, and it is too early to say what, if any, data was affected. If we determine sensitive information was affected, we will notify customers as appropriate.”
The company said: “Based on the investigation to date, Rackspace Technology believes that this incident was isolated to its Hosted Exchange business. Rackspace Technology’s other products and services are fully operational, and the company has not experienced an impact to its Email product line and platform.”
The company said an unknown number of hosted Exchange customers were without email services – more than four days after the initial outage.
“Rackspace is making available resources so that customers can migrate their users and domains to Microsoft 365”, it said in its blog post.
It said that it understood the frustration this situation has caused its customers and was doing everything possible to support them in migrating to Microsoft 365.
“We have surged our support staff and will be taking additional steps to help guide our customers through this process in order to limit the impact to their own operations.”
In the long term it looks like the hack might interrupt its Hosted Exchange business and may result in a loss of revenue for the Hosted Exchange business, which generates approximately $30m of annual revenue in the Apps & Cross Platform segment.
“In addition, Rackspace Technology may have incremental costs associated with its response to the incident.”
