Summary and Impact to Customers

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On Thursday 20 th September 2018 from 09:29 to 13:33, SYNAQ Cloud Mail experienced a mail

authentication and mail delay incident.

The resultant impact of the event was:

• The Admin and Webmail Consoles were inaccessible,

• Mail Clients could not access the platform, and;

• The resultant delay of inbound and outbound emails

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Root cause and Solution

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The root cause of this event was due to a scheduled change to increase the authentication

restrictions for the SYNAQ Cloud Mail solution. The addition of these changes to the platform

resulted in an increased amount of queries being sent to the LDAP servers which caused an overload

and an inability to process any authentication and mail delivery requests. More specifically, the

Admin, Webmail Consoles and Mail Clients were unable to query the LDAP servers for

authentication and information purposes which caused these consoles to become inaccessible and

further resulted in the delay of inbound and outbound emails.

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In order to resolve this issue, we rolled back the Cloud Mail change, which was completed by

10:53am. This automatically resolved the Admin, Webmail Console and Mail Client authentication

issue. However, due to the large email backlog that accumulated during this time, mail flow only

resumed to normal levels at 13:33pm.

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Remediation Actions

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We will be developing more comprehensive and stringent LDAP testing procedures as part

of future Cloud Mail changes to ensure that any further incidents of this nature are avoided.