Offline - The Second Wave Arrived?

It started on Thursday (around 8am) when our (meanwhile outsourced) email service started to refuse to authenticate me with a somewhat cryptic temporary failure error message during the SMTP authentication dialogue. I first hoped that this might be indeed a temporary failure. (Trust me, outsourced services do not work 24/7, at least not for me.) After roughly 24 hours, I lost patience and I engineered a different way to submit my emails (via some legacy local SMTP servers that still exist and were willing to accept my emails). With this workaround in place, I could work again as usual until around 6pm, when the SMTP dialogue started to hang. I quickly discovered that all central services are offline, I fear that the attack we experienced in September last year repeats - the second wave might have arrived.