US cloud service provider Rackspace is investigating a 12-hour, still-active outage causing connectivity issues and affecting the hosted Microsoft Exchange environments they manage for their customers.

The list of affected services includes MAPI/RPC, POP, IMAP, SMTP, ActiveSync, and the Outlook Web Access (OWA) interface used to access the Hosted Exchange instance to manage online emails.

“We are investigating an issue affecting our Hosted Exchange environments. More details will be released as they become available,” Rackspace said Friday night at 2:49 a.m. EST when it acknowledged the outage.

Twelve hours later and multiple updates with no information on what is causing what it describes as a “system disruption”, the company said it was “aware of an issue affecting” Hosted Exchange environments and that its engineering teams continue to work “to arrive at a resolution.”

“At this time, we are still in the investigation phase of this incident and will update our status page as more information becomes available,” Rackspace added as part of an update to its status page.

“Thank you for your patience. Our engineers continue to work on connectivity and connection issues in our Hosted Exchange environments. We are working diligently to resolve the issue,” the company also said. tweetedwithout providing details of the reason for the outage.

Affected customers have been advised to check the status page for the latest updates, although these also lack details on the root cause of the outage.

In response, disgruntled Rackspace customers are now asking the company social media to provide an ETA for when the service outage will be resolved and to share plans to transition to another more transparent managed service provider (MSP).

“Unacceptable response to this. We can all understand a breakdown, but lack of communication is going to cost you thousands of customers, including all of my customers,” one customer said. tweeted.

Another added.

Although there is no evidence to confirm this, due to Rackspace’s limited information, some customers have expressed concerns that the outage could be a direct result of a malware or ransomware attack.