FireEye has admitted that a snafu involving its email filtering technology meant harmless messages were shuffled off to quarantine for no good reason.
The glitch persisted for around two hours during during Monday morning before the problem was resolved, as a statement by the security vendor supplied to El Reg explains.
At approximately 10am BST Monday 1 August, FireEye became aware of an issue with a newly released version of the Security Content in its Email Security products that caused certain non-malicious emails to be temporarily quarantined.
A new version of Security Content was released in under two hours, limiting impact and resolving the issue for customers automatically.
FireEye deploys rapid updates to Security Content in order to quickly mitigate emerging campaigns, and we will continue to improve our testing and review prior to release.
El Reg heard of the “computer says no” issue from a reader who asked to remain anonymous and complained that FireEye “crippled email globally for all their customers running email protection”, a comment that doubtless stemmed from understandable personal frustration.
