We experienced a profound system failure this morning.

At around 1am on the 13th we installed some pending Windows updates to the server and abound restarting it to activate the updates the operating system of the server failed.

After spending considerable time trying to resurrect the OS and bring the server back on line we were forced to replace the drive to save the data that was on the drive in the event that a system restore from backup proved ineffective.

Whatever was causing the issue (corruption or a compromise) was included in the backup because bringing the system on line after the restore we saw the same problem.

We ended up having to rebuild the server from scratch and then copying the data from the saved original drive and modifying the configuration of the software to access the saved data.

The server started accepting mail again around 7pm.  The web server was brought back on line around 8pm and with most of the additional services back to function around 9pm.

Within about 45 minutes of the mail server coming on line we could see that there were almost 800 inbound emails sitting in the queue waiting to be processed.