Is anyone else unable to send or receive external email through Proofpoint? Our inbound and outbound mail stopped working at the same time, and the Proofpoint MX records do not appear to be resolving to IP addresses. The admin consoles are also inaccessible for some users. Is this a widespread outage, and has anyone found a safe workaround or received an official update?
5 Answers
Yes, this appears to be a Proofpoint DNS resolution problem affecting some customers. The GSLB-related records are failing to resolve, so mail systems cannot find the correct MX hosts. Reports are mixed because not every customer or service tier appears to use the same routing path.
Before changing DNS or connectors, check your mail queues, connector errors, and whether TCP 25 is reachable from an external system. If you already have a tested secondary mail route, fail over to it; otherwise, changing MX records during an outage could make recovery harder.
A temporary workaround that helped some teams was using the known direct Proofpoint MX hosts or IP addresses instead of the broken GSLB name. Another team updated its Exchange connector routing to the specific MX hostname returned by Proofpoint diagnostics. Be careful with hard-coded IPs, since they can change and bypass normal load balancing.
Some organizations reported that inbound and outbound mail continued normally while the Proofpoint portals were unavailable, while others lost both directions entirely. That likely explains the inconsistent reports and may depend on the customer environment, service tier, or whether GSLB-based records are involved.
Our MX records were also returning no IP address. We confirmed the issue by checking the Proofpoint MX hostname externally. Proofpoint later acknowledged an incident involving DNS resolution and posted an update on its public incident page.
That matches what we are seeing. The official status page had not been updated initially, but the incident was acknowledged later.