AOL E-Mail Disrupted by Software Glitch

AOL on Thursday experienced a software glitch that led to hours of e-mail delivery delays for millions of AOL users before company representatives identified the problem and fixed it, the Associated Press reports via the New York Post.

Nicholas Graham, an AOL spokesman, told the AP on Thursday that the company was still looking into the source of problem, which interrupted e-mail service from approximately 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. on June 1. 

Graham said a backlog of millions of electronic transmissions built up during the five-hour service disruption, and roughly 500,000 messages were being processed every minute after the problem was corrected, according to the AP. AOL expected e-mail delivery to return to normal by early Thursday evening, the AP reports.

“Currently all queued e-mails sent by AOL members and individual Internet users during the temporary hiatus are being successfully delivered to e-mail inboxes,” Graham said in a statement, according to the AP. “There is no longer any member impact on the AOL service from this rare and isolated incident.”

AOL subscribers, as well as users of the company’s free AIM.com service, which AOL parent company Time Warner created in 2005 in an attempt to snatch up Web surfers who weren’t AOL subscribers, were effected, the AP reports.

In early May, AOL, which built its customer base in the mid- to late-1990s with its simple, user-friendly interface, announced that it lost some 835,000 subscribers in the first quarter of 2006 and its operating profits dropped by 17 percent. A week later, it said it would cut 7 percent of its total global workforce, or 1,300 jobs, as well as shut down a call center. 

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