Is anyone else unable to send or receive external email through Proofpoint? Our inbound and outbound mail stopped working, and the Proofpoint MX hosts are not resolving to IP addresses. The administration consoles may also be unavailable. I'm trying to determine whether this is a broader Proofpoint outage or an issue isolated to certain customers or configurations.
3 Answers
Yes, several organizations are seeing the same thing. The common symptom is missing or failed DNS resolution for Proofpoint’s hosted MX/GSLB records, which prevents external mail from flowing in either direction. The impact appears to be uneven, though—some customers and configurations are still working normally.
Reports are mixed: some companies can still send and receive mail but cannot access the administration portals, while others have complete inbound and outbound failures. That likely reflects different Proofpoint products, regions, or whether the account uses GSLB and API-based mail flow. Checking the official incident notice and testing DNS from multiple resolvers should help confirm whether your tenant is affected.
A temporary workaround that helped some sites was using the known direct Proofpoint MX hostnames or IP addresses instead of the failing GSLB name. Another option is updating the Exchange connector’s routing target to the specific Proofpoint MX hosts. Treat this as an emergency workaround only, since hard-coding vendor IPs can become stale and may bypass normal load balancing or change unexpectedly.
We got mail moving again by identifying the direct MX hosts from the Proofpoint diagnostics and adjusting the connector. I would avoid changing public MX records or relying on old IPs unless the addresses are confirmed and you have a rollback plan.