Outages

Outage of Hotkey Services and some Redback Services. 30/01/12

Hotkey Web and email services seem to be currently under a Denial of Service type attack. This will effect email and web site services.

Some legacy service of email and web sites for Redback Communications are affected by this same incident.

For ongoing information subscribe to Twitter account @redbackcomms

Update: 11:50 Situation substantially improved, still some minor fluctuations.

Update: 14:00 This matter has been resolved.

Redback now sends out SMS notifications of planned and unplanned outages via Twitter.

If you want to receive these notifications via SMS please follow us on twitter @redbackcomms and ensure your twitter account is set to receive tweets via SMS.

Twitter have a good help centre that helps explain how to set-up SMS tweets on your mobile and twitter account.

https://support.twitter.com/groups/34-apps-sms-and-mobile

Regards,

Rod

UPDATE 10:50 am:

Engineers now report that the email problem is fixed.

UPDATE 10:20am:

Email issue improving. We are now receiving reports of some mail now working from people that were affected by the upgrade.

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Hotkey email server partially down but no ETA at the moment. The hardware in the mail servers was being upgraded last night and during the upgrade something has broken. Not all mailboxes have been affected and we are working on fixing the problem.

If you are affected by the problem, you can still access email by using webmail at the Hotkey website www.hotkey.net.au or by going directly to webmail https://webmail.hotkey.net.au/

Regards,

Rod

UPDATE 2 pm – Problem is now fixed. We do still recommend though changing your outgoing server to smtp.hotkey.net.au to avoid future issues.

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Hotkey customers be aware that the old outgoing email server mail.hotkey.net.au has been switched off. If you are a Hotkey customer and unable to send email please open your email package account settings area and change the Outgoing email server to be:

smtp.hotkey.net.au

Do NOT make any changes to your incoming email server settings.

Some customers have been experiencing long delays of 1 – 2 hours sporadically over the 3 days between the 7th and 9th November. This has been traced to a corruption in one of the server databases that maintains anti spam rules. The matter has been resolved and all old email queues have been delivered successfully.

Reminder: as advised in Aug 2011, Redback is discontinuing the use of earthlink.com.au email addresses on 31 Oct 2011.

Today we sent emails to all mailboxes. If you did not receive your email please contact us on 1300 655 882.

Regards,

Redback Communications

The spam load is abating as infected machines on the Internet are identified and blocked. New email is current being delivered promptly. Email held in deferred queues is still extremely large and it will take a few days for this to clear.

UPDATE 12 Sept 2011:  All back to normal.

Email administrators have noticed a large jump in SPAM coming into our mail servers. Security professionals identified this spam coming mainly from the Cutwail Botnet but also to a lesser extent from the Festi and Asprox botnets. Botnets are groups of compromised computers, generally home user computers, controlled by hackers/spammers that have been infected and can be controlled to perform tasks such as Spam delivery.  This has resulted in large delays for incoming email.

We are endeavouring to stop as much spam as possible however there may be delays in the delivery of real email while we filter out most of the rubbish emails.

You should always maintain a current up to date anti virus system and regularly patch your machine for security flaws to avoid contributing to this world wide problem.

UPDATE: 8-09-2011 15:30

Delays of a couple of hours are still being experienced in delivery of email. Spam attack is lessening but currently a large backlog of email is awaiting delivery. Courtesy of M86 Security Labs see the image below to show where most spam originates from around the world.

01 Sep 2011 ADSL Business customers may be experiencing issues where they are assigned an incorrect IP address. This may show itself as loss of data flow even though the modem is connected. The matter is being investigated and seems isolated to Northern Melbourne customers only at this stage.