AOL e-mail outage December 21 (resolved)
AOL.com had an outage lasting about 3 hours last night (from 11:24 PM Pacific time December 20 to 2:28 AM Pacific time December 21). This problem — a failure of AOL’s DNS servers — affected many people sending e-mail to AOL, and wasn’t related to our service (see this report and this one).
However, if you sent mail to an aol.com address during this time, your messages probably “bounced” with an error saying “Host or domain name not found. Name service error for name=aol.com”. If so, you should try sending the message again, and it will work normally. As always, we’ll continue to monitor AOL deliveries closely.
on Tuesday, December 21, 2010 at 10:25 am (Pacific) RK wrote:
If the problem has been resolved, why is my aol mail account down now (12:24 pm Eastern US, Dec. 21)?
You’ll notice I gave an alternate e-mail address above.
on Tuesday, December 21, 2010 at 10:36 am (Pacific) Robert Mathews wrote:
RK — we can’t help with problems that particular AOL users might have when reading mail, unfortunately. When we say the problem has been resolved, we’re just referring to the large-scale, major outage earlier today that caused bounces for anyone sending mail to any aol.com address, affecting millions of people.
on Tuesday, December 21, 2010 at 10:43 am (Pacific) BG wrote:
AOL Mail is still down and no users I know can access their mail. How have you fixed anything if no one can access their mail?? It does none of us any good if you fix the server but we still can’t access mail.
on Tuesday, December 21, 2010 at 11:02 am (Pacific) Robert Mathews wrote:
BG, I think there’s a misunderstanding here! We’re not AOL, and we don’t mean to suggest that we fixed anything. We’re just observers who (like many people) noticed that all mail to AOL earlier today was “bouncing” due to an AOL technical issue. The “all mail bouncing” problem we described is definitely not happening any more.
If you’re an AOL customer having trouble reading your mail, that’s a separate problem that we don’t know anything about, unfortunately. AOL is reporting more problems to do with reading mail (not with the bounce problem we wrote about), although we’re able to view our AOL test mailboxes without any problems.
on Tuesday, December 21, 2010 at 11:05 am (Pacific) JL wrote:
AOL email has become slower and slower over the past year and now is completely unaccessible to users!
on Tuesday, December 21, 2010 at 11:19 am (Pacific) Bill wrote:
It’s 1:17 p.m. in New Jersey, aka “The Home of the New Jersey Turnpike” and AOL Mail still isn’t working in this neck of the woods. Funny, it was earlier in the day. Now it loads to the point of the “Today on AOL” landing page, but none of the mail files opens or even appears. All I get are “contacts” and “calendar” …. Happy Holidays everyone. Guess it’s back to Fed Ex or (gasp) the phone if we need to contact someone in the near future.
on Friday, December 31, 2010 at 2:37 am (Pacific) Peter wrote:
Seriously? It’s the eve of 2011 and folks still use and require tech support for AOL? Really?
Impressive work TigerTech! Brilliant!!
😉
P