Rackspace

Rackspace pioneered what it called "Fanatical Support" — a managed hosting philosophy that differentiated on service quality rather than price alone — when it launched in San Antonio in 1998. The company was among the first to make managed dedicated server hosting accessible to businesses that could not afford in-house data centre operations, and its emphasis on responsive human support became a competitive identity in a market where most providers offered little more than hardware access. Rackspace was also a co-founder of the OpenStack open-source cloud platform alongside NASA, an initiative that attempted to create a vendor-neutral cloud infrastructure standard.

Rackspace today operates as a multi-cloud managed services provider, helping businesses architect, migrate, and operate workloads across AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and its own private cloud infrastructure. The company went public, went private through a leveraged buyout in 2016, and went public again in 2020. In late 2022 and 2023, Rackspace suffered a major ransomware incident that affected its Hosted Exchange email product, displacing thousands of business customers and becoming one of the more significant managed service provider security incidents of recent years.

When Rackspace experiences infrastructure problems, the customers most immediately affected are businesses that depend on it to run mission-critical workloads they do not manage internally. Managed hosting customers experiencing server failures cannot simply provision alternative capacity without Rackspace's involvement — the managed model means recovery workflows require Rackspace participation. Email hosting outages, following the pattern of the 2022 incident, cut businesses off from their primary communication infrastructure entirely. Cloud management portal failures prevent customers from accessing monitoring dashboards, configuration interfaces, and support ticketing systems at the moment they most need them.

Outage.gg tracks Rackspace infrastructure and service availability through community reports from customers and IT professionals. If Rackspace managed hosting is down, the customer portal is inaccessible, or specific cloud services are degraded, the live status page shows what the Rackspace customer community is reporting.