Summary and Impact to Customers

On Friday 12th March 2021 from 07:52 to 14:45, SYNAQ Cloud Mail experienced a mail authentication incident.

The resultant impact of the event was that users using ActiveSync to authenticate could not access the platform.

Root Cause and Solution

The root cause of this event was due to an error with the license for the ‘Next Generation’ mobile module, deployed at the beginning of February. The license failed to validate against the upstream licensing server and went into an automatic grace period. This grace period only lasts for 20 days and once the 20-day period had expired, the mobile module was no longer responding to authentication requests from ActiveSync. This was tested in staging and pre-production and passed tests successfully as this was not left to run past the 20-day grace period.

In order to resolve this issue, a license that had been validated against the license server was deployed. Once deployed, authentication requests via ActiveSync resumed.

Remediation Actions

• A permanent fix to correct these validation issues will be released in the next patch which will be rolled out to our servers following our extensive testing process.

• New monitoring alerts are being reviewed to be able to detect if these licenses move into the grace period again.