Cox restores residential email after 2-day outage - Hampton Roads

By Carolyn Shapiro
The Virginian-Pilot
? December 18, 2012

Cox Communications Inc. said it is closely monitoring its email platform after customers across the Midwest and East Coast stopped getting messages for two days.

Cox's email operation and a backup system for that operation both failed around 5 p.m. Friday, said Emma Inman, a spokeswoman at Cox's local headquarters in Chesapeake. The email storage system was receiving messages but wasn't delivering them to customers' inboxes.

Customers began receiving some emails again Sunday evening, and Cox had the system fixed at 6:30 a.m. Monday. The backed-up emails, however, might continue to appear - not necessarily in chronological order - for several days, Inman said.

She said the problem started in a data center outside Virginia, though she would not disclose the location, citing security reasons. She said the outage interrupted emails for residential customers in all Cox service areas in the Midwest and on the East Coast but did not affect email service for Cox business customers.

For competitive reasons, Inman said, the company would not provide the number of customers who lost service.

Cox has begun the process of replacing its email storage equipment and has put measures in place to prevent another problem, she said. "Technical teams continue to be on high alert and monitoring systems closely," she wrote in an email.

During what was probably a busy weekend for holiday shopping, including online purchases, Cox heard from no customers who had trouble fulfilling orders or conducting transactions, Inman said. Most of those who called the company wanted to know how the problem started and when service would be restored.

"We were not receiving mass volumes of customer complaints," she said.

Cox tried to communicate with customers as best it could, Inman said. The company posted updates on its website and Facebook page throughout the outage. A browser popup also alerted customers who were signed on to their email accounts while on the Internet.

Cox has no plan at this time to refund customers for the lost service time but will handle such requests on a case-by-case basis, Inman said.

"This was not a problem with Cox Internet. It was a problem affecting cox.net email addresses only," Inman wrote in an email. "Not all of our customers use cox.net email addresses, or use them very infrequently. Many customers have other email clients, and we want to address on an individual basis those customers who did experience an impact."

Source: http://hamptonroads.com/2012/12/cox-restores-residential-email-after-2day-outage

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