Mimecast Back To Normal After Cyber Attack

Normal service has resumed at Mimecast after a cyber attack on Monday disrupted its service for some customers in the United States.

The company insisted that it has seen no impact to email and data, beyond network service degradation.

Cyber Attack

The attack took place on Monday which left some US customers unable to access their email.

“On Monday Mimecast had service delivery issues impacting US customers,” Mimecast Chief Executive Peter Bauer told TechweekEurope.

“Mimecast experienced malicious traffic from multiple IP addresses, targeting its US network. This resulted in service disruption for US customers during the day while backlogs cleared after the service was restored.”

“Our services are now running as normal,” he added. “We’ve seen no evidence of impact to email and data beyond the network service degradation.”
Mimecast  specialises in providing cloud-based email management services to businesses, and the firm has previously told TechweekEurope that it wants to transform email into an interactive data archive to help organisations find value in that archived data.

In 2013 the company experienced a ‘network infrastructure failure’. It quickly traced the problem to a hardware network failure at its data centre in Woking, Surrey.

That failure was viewed seriously by Mimecast’s management, as at the time the company had not been shy in promoting its 100 percent SLA (service level agreement) for customers.

That said, the firm has geographically dispersed data centres around the world in order minimise disruption and ensure redundancy and replication.

Cloud Outages

Mimecast is of course not the only cloud service provider to experience problems of late.

Some customers of Amazon Web Services experienced service disruption at the weekend, following problems at a data centre on the east coast of the United States.Earlier this month, Fujitsu confirmed a “significant outage” in the company’s Californian data centre in August, that subsequently knocked out its cloud services.

Google also suffered a cloud outage in Europe in August as lightning strikes killed the power in the company’s Belgium data centre. Four successive lightning strikes affected the power running to the data centre were the cause of the four-day cloud outage.

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