I was able to communicate with the data center via phone this morning and get some more details.
The number one question on everyone's mind is "what about my old email?", "where is my data?".
Your data is fine. It is secured. Email that was sent on Friday or over the weekend was delivered to your exchange mailboxes. No email was bouncing or being returned. The data center had to shut off access to the exchange servers via outlook/active sync and owa. But email continued to be delivered. It was late on Friday when I came to the educated guess that mail services were not going to come back online before Monday. I made the decision to setup local pop/imap mailboxes on my servers over the weekend and route all mail to these temporary mailboxes until the data center could bring the exchange access back online. That was a good call because it is now Monday and services are not yet restored.
The second question everyone has is when? What is the ETA??
The tech did say it will come back online, but could not give me an ETA. Personally, I'm thinking/planning this may take till the end of the week. Yes, December 9th. That's just a guess without any clue what they are doing in the backend to fix things. If it comes back online before then, switching your mail back will take seconds to do. Once exchange services are restored and everyone has access to their mailboxes (myself included) we can discuss alternatives.
I appreciate your patience and know full well how important mail services are to you and myself. I am your advocate and I am not happy with the situation at all. Who likes using clunky webmail when you have been used to using outlook? I don't want to use webmail either. So once services are restored we can discuss options going forward.