Is MX Guarddog down, and what’s the safest way to bypass the outage?

The outage appears to be a single-site failure rather than just a temporary mail-routing problem. A cooling failure can take down equipment regardless of whether the site is in Phoenix or somewhere colder; the important issue is that there was no effective failover to another location. I’d be reviewing any provider’s actual data-center redundancy claims before continuing to rely on them.

This highlights why an email-filtering service needs genuine geographic and infrastructure redundancy. Having multiple MX records does not help much if they all depend on the same facility. Most senders will queue and retry for hours or even days, so delayed mail is more likely than permanently lost mail.

We had to redirect several domains directly to our mail servers. The change worked, but DNS propagation was not immediate, and some senders continued retrying the unavailable gateway. Anyone making the switch should monitor inbound mail closely and be prepared for more junk mail while filtering is bypassed.

If you bypass the gateway, first confirm that your mail server accepts connections from the entire internet. Some environments only allow inbound traffic from the filtering provider’s IP ranges. You’ll also need to account for the sudden increase in spam and phishing, review SPF and DMARC behavior, and document any firewall or connector changes so they can be reversed later.