We are currently experiencing an issue with our payment processing portion of our billing system, and as such are temporarily unable to accept or process payments.

Our support engineers are working directly with the vendor to reach a solution. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause our customers, and thank you for your continued patience and understanding.

Due to the nature of automation in our billing system, you will still receive email notifications informing you that your credit card was declined, an invoice is due, an invoice is past due, or reminding you of an upcoming payment — for the time being, please disregard these emails, as we will be overriding any adverse functions that could affect your service.

As soon as we’ve addressed the problem and carried out the necessary steps to fix it, we will make an announcement and take care of any pending payments. If you have your credit card information saved in our system, the payments should be automatically processed when the system is brought back online.

If you have any questions or concerns regarding this matter, please submit a trouble ticket.

KEEP IN MIND, if you feel the need to leave messages via phone, email, and multiple trouble tickets, we understand your need for urgency but it will take us away from helping other customers that have been patiently waiting for the support they need — so we ask for your cooperation and extra patience over the course of the next few days.

Thank you,

Smile Support Team

10:45am – we were alerted by our monitoring system that our primary web hosting server (v2.smileglobal.com) was unresponsive and unreachable.

11:00am – we were connected to the internal network and remote management interface of the server. We follow our standard procedure to identify the cause of the outage and were able to discover the the nature of the problem.

11:10am – The immediate solution called for a quick power-cycle of the machine, followed by a modification to a scheduled maintenance script.

11:20am – The server was back online and fully operational.

We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your understanding during the brief outage earlier this hour.

We’ve been notified of a problem with a recent set of definition updates for our anti-malware/anti-virus system that has inadvertently caused some messages to be rejected by our filtering servers.

You may have experienced this issue or been informed by an outside party that your message was rejected, with an error similar to or the same as the following:

Your email was rejected because it contains the MBL_349876.UNOFFICIAL

We’ve taken the steps necessary to resolve the issue and ensure that mail is once again flowing through to our customers. This was an upstream issue caused by a bad set of definitions provided by our anti-malware/anti-virus distributor. We apologize for the inconvenience and will keep you informed of any further status changes or problems, should they occur.

Thank you,

Smile Support Team

We experienced several connectivity issues shortly after midnight today (June 27th, 2013), and began immediately working on evaluating the situation and working towards a solution.

By 8am we were able to have the server back online, along with our websites and all the customer sites that were hosted on the machine. We are still reviewing the logs on the server to determine the exact nature of the outage, and don’t have a definitive diagnosis at this point – however, early indicators are suggesting that it was a combination of a Distributed-denial-of-service (or DDOS) attack which started this whole thing off, and then a problem with the RAID array in the server itself, which prevented the machine from completing its boot sequence.

Thank you for your patience, and we are truly sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused you.

Smile Support Staff