We would like to apologize for the interruption of email services caused by this incident.
At approximately 4:00 PM Eastern Time instances responsible for hosting all email related services became unavailable. This caused major interruptions of SMTP (outbound email service), POP and IMAP (inbound email service) and email marketing services.
Bottlenose staff, working with Amazon Web Services (AWS) technical support team, determined the cause of the problem was degraded hardware on the hosts serving the email service instances. Once the instances were redeployed on different hardware the email services started to become available. However, the ssh service was not running requiring further maintenance on the instances. Just before 7:00 PM Eastern Time all service was restored.
We could have reduced outage period significantly had our monitoring processes performed better. Our monitoring system detected the problem immediately but failed to get alerts to the on-call engineer. We will look at our notification and alerting system to see what can be improved going forward.