Fergie's Tech Blog

AOL e-Mail Hit by Software Glitch

An AP newswire article, via Yahoo! News, reports that:

Millions of AOL users encountered delays sending and receiving e-mail Thursday as the company worked to identify and fix a software glitch.

AOL spokesman Nicholas Graham said the company was investigating the cause of the problems, which began late in the morning.

He said millions of messages were stuck in a queue and all would eventually get delivered. But as technicians tried to fix the problem, he said, users faced difficulties accessing their accounts, particularly through AOL's Web interfaces.

The glitch affected both AOL.com e-mail for paid subscribers and its free AIM.com offering, which the Time Warner Inc. Internet unit began offering a year ago to lure nonsubscribers to its ad-supported sites.

More here.

Update:

A Reuters newswire article says they've corrected the problem:

Internet service AOL said on Thursday it had resolved a software problem that delayed the transmission of millions of e-mails since the late morning.
Many AOL members had been unable to send or receive new e-mails since 11.00 a.m. Eastern Time.

In the interim, AOL was queuing messages that already were sent to relay them quickly once the problem was solved.

AOL said later on Thursday that the ability to transmit had been restored. The company was in the process of sending e-mails that it had stored in its queue during the day at the rate of 500,000 messages per minute, company spokesman Nicholas Graham said.

Link.

posted by Fergie @ 6/01/2006 04:43:00 PM