Wednesday, November 19, 1997

AOL e-mail goes blank for nearly five hours in latest outage problem

By PETER ALAN HARPER / AP Business Writer

NEW YORK (AP) -- America Online lost e-mail service for nearly five hours Tuesday during the third brownout in less than a month for the nation's largest online service.

AOL, which is still installing new equipment because of chronic busy signals earlier this year, said the problem causing the three brownouts should be eliminated after the company installs new hardware next month.

"The good news about that is we've identified this recurring problem and identified a fix for it," said AOL spokesman Tom Ziemba. AOL is testing the device before installing it, he added, because "we want to solve this problem and not make it worse."

Ziemba said Tuesday's problem started about 9 a.m. EST. Subscribers already using e-mail were blocked from all e-mail functions but still could use other AOL services such as access to the Internet. However, those not logged onto AOL could not use any functions.

By 11 a.m., the log-on capacity was fully restored but there still were problems with e-mail. By noon, subscribers could generate directories of their e-mail and read previous messages but could not send new messages.

By 1:40 p.m., AOL said, service was completely restored, no e-mail was lost, and AOL claimed to have a solution to its predicament.

"It's a problem caused by a product made by a particular company," Ziemba said, declining to further identify the technical problem or the company involved.

If so, AOL has solved one of its biggest flaws.

On Oct. 30, AOL members couldn't access AOL for about 90 minutes and e-mail was disrupted for several hours. On Nov. 3, millions of subscribers lost their e-mailing ability for several hours.

But AOL's biggest headache occurred as an onslaught of new customers, after AOL radically changed its pricing structure, overloaded the company's modems in the first months of the year. AOL has been installing 25,000 modems a month to overcome this problem.

Ziemba said these problems have not hurt AOL's credibility.

"I would say downtime is still less than one percent of overall time, including scheduled system maintenance," said the spokesman from the company's Dulles, Va., headquarters. "While we take these problems very seriously and work to prevent them as soon as possible, it's still a relatively small amount of time."

AOL, which announced Monday that it had topped 10 million subscribers, has an estimated 20 percent of the world's online population and half of the wired households in the United States.