Summary and Impact to Customers

On Wednesday 28th April 2021 from 13:38 to 14:56, SYNAQ Cloud Mail experienced a mail authentication incident.

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

Root Cause and Solution

The root cause of this event was due to a failed route on our primary “High Availability” server and the Secondary server not taking over. With the route being down, the authentication requests were unable to reach the Cloud Mail proxy servers and authentication was unable to complete.

To resolve this issue, the primary server had to be shutdown to bring the routes back up again. Once the routes had been restored to the Cloud Mail proxy server, authentication requests were once again being processed and users could access their mail.

Upon further investigation, it was determined that the Secondary server had a configuration error which prevented it from being able to detect there was a problem with the primary server, which would have allowed it to take over. This configuration has been corrected and failover has since been tested and this moved across seamlessly.

Remediation Actions

• A full audit of all HA servers to ensure all their rules are identical.

• Scheduled failover testing of HA servers to be implemented.