Some AOL users lose e-mail temporarily

April 3, 2002

An upgrade to America Online's e-mail system caused a small percentage of AOL users to temporarily lose access to their e-mail from remote locations on Tuesday and Wednesday.

The problem affected "a very small percentage" of users who tried to gain access to their e-mail from the aol.com Web site, said spokesman Nicholas Graham.

Normally, AOL customers access their e-mail accounts through AOL's internal network. When customers don't have access to their regular AOL accounts, though, they can also send and retrieve e-mail from any computer linked to the Internet through the aol.com Web site.

Changes to that "AOL on the Web" service are what caused problems Tuesday and Wednesday, Graham said. Certain versions of Web browsers were not working properly with the new service, and customers would get error messages, Graham said.

No e-mail was lost as a result of the glitch, and Graham said AOL technicians believed the problem has been fixed.