Earlier this afternoon, starting at approximate 12:30 PM Pacific, one of the North American datacenters used for the MAX Mail service, a SoftLayer facility in Seattle, experienced issues with their fiber data connections which brought the facility offline.  The other two primary data centers used for North American traffic were unaffected, as was the entire European infrastructure.

Full connectivity at the facility was restored after approximately 25 minutes.  The outage potentially could have resulted in some short term delays in accepting messages for customers whose primary datacenter is Seattle.  However, the design of the primary and backup MX records is to point to different datacenters, and most well-behaved mail servers should immediately try the backup MX record if the primary one is non-responsive, thus avoiding any delay.  Partly as a result, we would expect that the vast majority of customers would have experienced no impact.

The Seattle datacenter has back been online for roughly 90 minutes and appears to be stable and operating normally.  If there are any further developments, we will post additional information.