Summary: On May 2, 2024, one of the components within our Hosted Email infrastructure failed. We upgraded the software to fix the problem when the initial recovery effort failed. This situation coincided with a Denial of Service attack, which greatly increased traffic levels, leading to an unresponsive webmail. Mitigation efforts were then taken to block abusing IPs, which allowed the authentication service to recover. Webmail response times returned to expected levels that day, and to ensure the actions we took resolved the issue, we continued to monitor the event until May 6. Once confirmed, we closed this incident.

Client Impact: Webmail and login were slow or unresponsive. Email delivery was delayed due to a short-term IMAP/POP failure.

Remediation: We’ve taken the following actions to prevent a future recurrence:

• Authorization service reengineering: We’re reducing wait times to expected levels by reengineering the software to scale to higher levels of traffic. We’ll also provide better tools to manage the authentication process. .
• Proactively arranging maintenance windows: A set of quarterly change windows will be scheduled to address any software updates and preventative maintenance required on the hosted email infrastructure. We'll ensure you're aware of updates/maintenance windows and their impact in advance, and we'll schedule them to occur when our server traffic is typically at its lowest.
• Increased abuse mitigation efforts: We’re exploring new options to reduce occurrences and the impact of abuse.

Thank you,

Tucows Domains Operations Team