E-mail outage cuts off Optimum users

Optimum Online, a subsidiary of Cablevision — one of the nation’s largest cable providers — was plagued by outages in its e-mail services that lasted from early Thursday until Friday afternoon.

The service provider says that the outage began midday Thursday. However, some customers say they were unable to access their e-mail as early as Wednesday at midnight.

“The e-mail disruption has been resolved,” said Cablevision representative Sarah Chaikin in an e-mailed release Friday afternoon. “The issue was caused by a digital mail storage device malfunction. We believe that this was an extremely rare, one-time problem after more than a decade of uninterrupted e-mail service and that no customer e-mail was lost. We apologize to our customers and thank them for their patience.”

Customers who tried to access their e-mail through Optimum.net, Cablevision’s e-mail service, were unable to log on. The errors included messages saying the page wasn’t available to nothing happening when customers tried to log on.

Subscribers also had problems accessing customer support, with lines being held up by multiple calls. Eventually, Cablevision stopped taking calls and switched to an automated message. The message told those trying to call in that Cablevision’s phone system couldn’t accept any more calls, but gave customers no information about what was happening.

Service was restored Friday afternoon. Cablevision says that the outage was confined to a minority of customers, but not limited to one area. According to Cablevision’s website, the company provides services to more than five million people.

Word of the outage spread mainly through the Internet, with upset customers from all over the Tri-State area jumping onto Twitter and complaining about the lack of service as well as the blackout on information — there were no messages on the Cablevision website or on Optimum.net alerting users to the problem or when it may be resolved.

Two of Cablevision’s media subsidiaries — News 12 Long Island and Newsday — did not report the issue until Friday. Newsday ran the story in its business section, but as of Friday afternoon, the story was not on the business section of the paper’s website.