Spamhaus suffered outage; is back now


From 17:00 GMT on Feb 16th through 09:50 GMT on February 17th, spam filterer/security service Spamhaus suffered an outage that meant that "data included in the Data Query Service, Rsync, Spamhaus Intelligence API, and Border Gateway Protocol Firewall was not refreshed between these times."

The way most Spamhaus data is shared with the world allows for quite a bit of redundancy and resilience against downtime, in that DNS queries can be cached, DNS zones are handed out to and stored by different remote DNS servers. Meaning that while some of Spamhaus core systems may have been offline during this time, spam filtering continued unabated. They're saying that their ability to make any updates (additions or removals) was effectively blocked during the downtime, meaning anybody waiting for removal from a Spamhaus list probably had to wait a bit longer for a response than usual. And also, perhaps spam filtering effectiveness was down slightly due to the inability to add new spamming IPs, domains and networks to their various feeds.

At any rate, it's all back now.

TL;DR? Sender impact: Spamhaus downtime could have resulted in waiting longer for a response or resolution to a blocklist removal request.

Here's links to the initial Linkedin notice from Spamhaus, and notification of returning to operational status (which was shared on Linkedin and also sent out via email.

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