AOL email outage hits 500,000

America Online's (AOL) suffered another problem today with its email hardware, which affected 500,000 people.

At about 6 a.m. one of the mail servers, responsible for about 7 percent of AOL member's mail, malfunctioned, AOL spokeswoman Tricia Primrose said.

By 3:30 p.m., mail was restored to about one fifth of those members, or 100,000 people. Primrose expected the remainder of members to be with email by tomorrow morning.

Meanwhile, members were told that they could send and receive mail by creating new screen names. Unlike Microsoft Network, which assigns email servers alphabetically, AOL assigns servers to names on a rotating basis. That means that, while one screen name may be affected by an outage, it is quite likely that another won't, Primrose explained.

While this problem is not the worst outage by any stretch of the imagination, it comes on top of two other mini-blackouts in the last 1-1/2 weeks.

Last week, an outage affected 150,000 of AOL's 8 million-plus subscribers. Then on Wednesday, AOL suffered its second mini-outage when the system was down for four hours instead of the scheduled two, affecting 20,000 people. AOL took down its mail servers to do a hardware upgrade between 1 a.m. and 3 a.m., but problems kept it offline until 5 a.m.

But many others experienced delays all day because of the brief outage. While the system is down, AOL continues collecting the mail but doesn't resume delivery until it comes back up.

Because so many pieces of email flow through AOL's system every day--some 14 million, according to senior vice president David Gang--even a brief outage can cause a major traffic jam. Traffic generally takes several hours to clear, Gang said, likening the backup to an airport suffering flight delays because of bad weather.

[phashmi]

Well it's down again today 9-8-09!!!!!!!!

[brigbrig]

mine is down now...all evening

[brigbrig]

mine has not worked all evening...10 10 09

[needs]

Dec 03, 2009 mails been down almost 5 hours and it's 4:30 am now.

[kenmurak]

As struggling all over the world, I've been facing this problem too and can't retrieve any AOL emails.... it sucks.

[ruthm4x]

My email went down yesterday afternoon (10/03/10) and today (11/03/10) I can't sign in at all. Does anyone know when it will be up & running again?

[TSnCSdrgnlvrz2010]

I haven't been able to sign in or even get to the sign in page...Sigh -.- ...It's been like a month? O.o? Maybe.... somewhere around that. I'd really really REALLY like to get back on it =( ... I have a couple of beautiful sparkling F's in English class now... I'm not a happy camper. Well, toodlez....
ps. Can someone please fix the problem? =/ Thank you... ^.^

[jwschaut]

To those who were down on President Obama in his support of the building of a mosque at the 9/11 traguc site I deign consider as fellow Americans...at least not on a par with me....This group testifies to ignorance and stupidity....The First Amendment in our constitution guarantees freedom of religion...This is what it is all about....I am not a religious person, but I am a firm believer in freedom of religion...press...speech...et. al.....whether it is of my choosing....I detest intolerance with all my heart, and this is what the majority response here is......Albert Einstein once stated: "Two things are infinite; The universe and human stupidity, and I am not sure about the universe." If I were a religious person I would amen that...I do agree in toto....The United States of America is a nation of laws...not of men....Hitler, Stalin for example headed up nations of men who had little regard for human rights.......John Schaut, Bradenton [e-mail]



























































































































"