A visibly weary Kaseya CEO announced that VSA SaaS and on-premises services would be back online Sunday afternoon, in a largely off-script, heartfelt and apologetic address to his clients.
CEO Fred Voccola also announced plans to offer financial assistance for customers affected by the outage.
"We're doing what we can do," he said, "I assure you no one at Kaseya wanted this to happen. None of you want it. We love our customers and it pisses me off when we do things to hurt them."
Between 50 and 60 of Kaseya's on-premises remote monitoring and management customers, by the company's count, were breached by a REvil ransomware affiliate on Friday. Well over a thousand customers of managed service providers using Kaseya VSA were infected with ransomware. The company quickly took SaaS services offline as a precautionary measure.
Kaseya had originally suggested that SaaS would already be restored and a patch already released. Voccola addressed the delay and took personal responsibility in his message.
"The new release time, which we are very confident in, is going to be this Sunday in the early afternoon, Eastern Standard Time. Now, that's a long time to be down. I understand... It was my decision, and no one else's decision, to pull the release from yesterday that we had set," the Kaseya CEO said.
Voccola said that the company has "locked down" all vulnerabilities leveraged in the attack. However, consultants assisting in the recovery suggested additional new layers of security that Voccola decided to put in place before release.
"This was probably the hardest decision that I've had to make in my career," he said.
Voccola went on to announce that Kaseya would provide aid to customers who needed it following the attack in an offering modeled after a financial assistance program the company launched after COVID-19 hit.
"We will be providing direct financial assistance to MSPs who have been crippled by the REvil people, and the new adversaries that we face. We will also be spending millions of dollars, working with third-party consulting companies and our own professional services team providing licensed delays of payments.
Throughout his address, Voccola repeatedly expressed personal disappointment with the distress VSA had been a part of.
"It's very different than the type of relationship that we have with our customers, where we are mission-critical," he said.
As he succinctly summarized on the outset of his video: "This sucks."
