This article is more than 1 year old

Trend Micro hosted email service is down, inboxes still stuck in cloudy limbo

Blames spam filters for brownout, warns fix could be 'disruptive'

Trend Micro’s hosted email security product is experiencing a global brownout.

The security company’s Japanese support pages say the incident started on Monday afternoon at 1515 UTC, or a quarter past midnight in Tokyo, and has not been resolved at the time of writing more than ten hours later.

Trend’s sparse notification says the company is “aware of some email delivery delays in Hosted Email Security and Pre-filter products affecting customers in all regions. We are currently addressing the issue and hope to have it resolved as soon as possible.”

The Register was tipped off to the incident by Australian customers who are currently unable to send or receive emails and had to change their MX records to reach our newsroom by email.

Trend's support articles suggest there are two issues.

In this article Trend staff attribute the issue to a “specific anti-spam mail pattern file,” say it only impacts the Trend Micro Hosted Email Security service, and advise that emails are being delayed and that no messages have been lost.

In this article, the firm says a number of products (listed below) are impacted by the problem with the Hosted Email service and names pattern files 26144.000, 26144.001 and 26144.002 as the source of the problem and says a new pattern file, number 26146.000, fixes the problem.

But the article warns the upgrade may be disruptive.

“If the CPU usage is high and the update process is not completed, restart the service or OS and check that the pattern file is updated,” the article advises.

The list of impacted products comprises:

  • InterScan Messaging Security Suite
  • InterScan Messaging Security Virtual Appliance
  • InterScan for Microsoft Exchange
  • InterScan for Domino
  • Deep Discovery Email Inspector
  • Trend Micro Cloud App Security
  • Trend Micro Hosted Email Security
  • Cloud Edge

The Register has contacted Trend Micro seeking more data on the outage and will update this story if newsworthy information comes to hand. ®

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