Server and System Status

NC027: Previous issue with outbound email to MessageLabs

8 April 2017 07:56:47 +0000

Further to our last post of two days ago, a little research digs up the fact that Symantec/MessageLabs “had a major incident … that led to an issue with multiple customers.” As we suspected, the problem was not with our mail server.

The message backlog was actually finally cleared within a couple of hours of that post.

Tags: email delivery
Categories: Email, NC027
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NC027: Issue with outgoing mail to MessageLabs/Symantec

6 April 2017 13:36:18 +0000

For several hours now we have been noticing that emails sent to domains hosted by Symantec on mail exchangers running their MessageLabs service (or the service formerly known as MessageLabs) have been stalled on our mail server (NC027) with errors such as the following:

(delivery temporarily suspended: lost connection with cluster6.us.messagelabs.com[216.82.242.46] while sending message body)

Particularly, messages with multiple recipients seem to be stalling like this, while other outbound emails to other domains not hosted by Symantec seem to be going out with no problem. Some messages appear to be going through over time, but not all.

Destination domains that seem to be affected by this include the following:

barrick.com (Barrick Gold Corporation)
sc.com (Standard Chartered)

We’re continuing to monitor this situation, but at this point there doesn’t seem to be anything that we have the power to do.

Tags: email delivery
Categories: Email, NC027
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NC027: Mail server emergency maintenance

23 February 2017 16:22:59 +0000

The mail server (NC027) was shut down between 16:08 and 16:11 UTC this (Thursday) afternoon for some emergency maintenance. This would have resulted in a brief interruption in your ability to send and receive email.

If you have any questions about this, please contact us. Thank-you.

Tags: connection issues, email delivery, smtp
Categories: Email, Maintenance, NC027
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NC027: Mail server report

30 January 2017 13:18:24 +0000

We have not yet been able to determine a cause of the problem with the mail server (NC027). It seems that it stopped processing mail at 08:46 UTC, which means it was unavailable for 56 minutes until it was up and running again at 09:42 UTC. The server didn’t become completely unresponsive to monitoring until about 09:25 UTC, which is when the problem came to out attention. A few minutes later, after determining that the server was completely inaccessible and posting to our status page, we issued a full reboot. After a few minutes of disk scanning, the server was back online and processing email.

We apologise again for this brief interruption in service. If you have any questions, please contact us and we will be happy to respond.

Tags: connection issues, down time, email delivery, smtp
Categories: Email, Incidents, NC027
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NC027: Mail server rebooted

30 January 2017 10:01:07 +0000

The mail server (NC027) was rebooted and back online at 09:42 UTC. We are looking into the problem and will post an update here within the next two hours.

We apologise for the inconvenience.

Tags: connection issues, down time, email delivery, smtp
Categories: Email, Incidents, NC027
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NC027: Problem on mail server

30 January 2017 09:34:18 +0000

We are aware of a problem with the mail server (server NC027). We are looking into it and will post an update here as soon as possible.

Tags: connection issues, down time, email delivery, smtp
Categories: Email, Incidents, NC027
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NC027: Mail server back online

23 November 2016 07:28:27 +0000

The mail server (NC027) has been restarted after cleaning up after a spammer. It was down for eight minutes between 07:09 and 07:17 UTC.

As a result of this incident, our mail server is being blocked by some mail services. We will work to have those blocks removed before they expire, but this will take some time.

These incidents usually arise after a computer has been infected with a virus. The virus then sends the email password back to the person or organisation controlling the virus, and they then use that information to compromise that email account on the mail server, using it to send thousands of spams from the account. Please ensure that you install, use and update an anti-virus program on your computer to ensure that this doesn’t happen to your email account.

We again apologise for this incident. Please contact us if you have any questions. Thank-you.

Tags: down time, email delivery, spam
Categories: Incidents, NC027
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NC027: Mail server shut down

23 November 2016 07:11:41 +0000

We have temporarily shut down server NC027 to clean up after a spammer. It will be back up in a few minutes. We apologise for the inconvenience.

Tags: down time, email delivery, spam
Categories: Incidents, NC027
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Chromium certificate issue resolved

17 November 2016 20:08:44 +0000

The issue with the Google Chromium web browser reporting valid certificates as “unsafe” has been resolved today with an update to Chromium.

Update, 2016-11-20: We’ve posted a commentary about this on our blog.

Tags: browser warnings, ssl, ssl certificate, tls, tls certificate, web server
Categories: Incidents, NC018, NC020, NC027, NC031
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Issues with *.niner.net certificate

16 November 2016 10:34:52 +0000

We are aware that s small subset of users of the Chromium web browser may receive the following error when trying to access websites and control panels via HTTPS that use the *.niner.net certificate:

Your connection is not private

Attackers might be trying to steal your information from cp31.niner.net (for example, passwords, messages or credit cards). NET::ERR_CERTIFICATE_TRANSPARENCY_REQUIRED

(cp31.niner.net will be replaced by whatever domain you are trying to access.)

If you click the “ADVANCED” link you will see the following additional information:

The server presented a certificate that was not publicly disclosed using the Certificate Transparency policy. This is a requirement for some certificates, to ensure that they are trustworthy and protect against attackers.

This is a bug in Google Chromium, not a problem with our certificate.

Until Google fixes this bug we recommend using a better web browser (e.g., Firefox), or clicking the “Proceed to cp31.niner.net (unsafe)” link that is revealed when you click “ADVANCED” as described above. Clicking the “unsafe” link is indeed safe in this case. Even very big and very busy websites — such as Yahoo and Flickr for example — are currently affected by this bug.

Tags: browser warnings, ssl, ssl certificate, tls, tls certificate, web server
Categories: Incidents, NC018, NC020, NC027, NC031
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System	Status	Ping
NC023	Internal	Up?
NC028	Internal	Up?
NC031	Internal	Up?
NC033	Operational	Up?
NC034	Internal	Up?
NC035	Operational	Up?
NC036	Operational	Up?
NC040	Internal	Up?
NC041	Operational	Up?
NC042	Operational	Up?