Barracuda email security scanning services in worldwide TITSUP

'What's happening?' ask angry folk left with little info

Security biz Barracuda is suffering an apparent failure of its email security service, according to angry customers who got in contact with El Reg.

The outage began at about 1430 GMT. While the official Barracuda status webpage confessed to "degraded performance" for inbound email delivery and the web interface, sources told The Register that the practical effect was a total outage.

"Barracuda’s Email Security Service is down in the UK at least – either that or it's so secure it's not actually allowing anything at all through," said one, who added: "We've got a number of clients on it that are currently unable to receive any email."

Predictably, lots of affected customers went to Twitter to see what was going on. Upon finding the @Barracuda account saying nothing at all about it by 1630 GMT, they started getting annoyed.

@barracuda What's happening with ESS? We've got no service in the UK currently!

— Graysons (@Graysonslaw) November 2, 2016

@Graysonslaw @barracuda Same here, multiple domains. All broken. Looks like DOS attack on @BarracudaEMEA

— Chris Edwards (@sscde) November 2, 2016

The outage spread as widely as New Jersey...

@barracuda Any updates or ETR for the service interruption in NJ?

— Clinton Hague (@HagueTech) November 2, 2016

… and Colombia:

@barracuda está intermitente!! Service
intermittent!! :( pic.twitter.com/Bmw5I1RwxP

— Sistemas INFOES⠠⠵ (@sistemasINFOES) November 2, 2016

An emailed statement from Barracuda sent to The Register said: "So our Email security service is not down but there is a performance degradation, there is a delay in mail delivery at the moment. Our engineering and operations are investigating this and working on a fix."

Chris Edwards of Red Train IT, one of Barracuda's customers, said: "I understand outages happen from time to time, but when there is no real update anywhere, and nobody wants to speak to you, it gets very concerning especially as we are offering their cloud services as part of our service package so it also begins to look bad on us." ®

Bootnote

TITSUP = Total Inability To Support Usual Performance.