Fun_People Archive
12 Aug
AOL Crash

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From: Peter Langston <psl>
Date: Mon, 12 Aug 96 15:55:46 -0700
To: Fun_People
Subject: AOL Crash

Forwarded-by: Keith Bostic <bostic@bsdi.com>
Forwarded-by: Sam Leffler <sam@engr.sgi.com>
Forwarded-by: Matt Drudge <drudge@lainet.com>

CRASH

The largest online computer network, America Online,
has crashed (Wednesday) for more than 10 hours. It
crashed during installation of new software and there
was no esimate on when the problem will be fixed.

America Online serves more than six million members.
This is the largest system crash of its kind.

_____________________________________________________________________________

Forwarded-by: Keith Bostic <bostic@bsdi.com>
Forwarded-by: Wendell Craig Baker <wbaker@splat.Baker.COM>

NYT Report:

America Online Suffers One of Worst Outages in Cyberspace History

Six million America Online users were left off-line Wednesday when the
system went down, cutting them off from e-mail, chat rooms and the World
Wide Web. The system went down at 4 a.m. EDT during a scheduled
maintenance update, routine work that is generally done at that hour to
inconvenience the fewest possible members. It was still down 10 hours
later, making it one of the worst outages in on-line history in terms of
length and number of people affected, The Associated Press said.

"What happened was when we were doing the installation, we had a technical
problem. As a result, that technical problem has caused a delay in having
the system available to our members," spokeswoman Pam McGraw said from
AOL's Chantilly, Va., offices.

When users of the country's largest commercial on-line service tried to
log in, they were greeted by a message saying "Good-bye from America
Online. The system is temporarily unavailable. Please try again in 1 hour
and 30 minutes. Thank you for calling." AOL Chairman Steve Case said every
possible resource was applied to restore the service. "We regret any
inconvenience this may have caused our customers. We will work to ensure
that the problem does not recur," he said. Previously, a software glitch
brought down America Online's e-mail system for an hour on June 19, but
McGraw said that was a different problem from the one Wednesday.
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