Verizon’s (News - Alert) e-mail service has been crippled since early this morning. Here is what the company has to say about all of this on their website as of 3 p.m. EDT.
Needless to say, since you can’t talk to somebody about the problem, that is all we know publicly.
As somebody with a personal Verizon e-mail account I can tell you that since early this morning until about 2:30 p.m. EDT I had no service. I first noticed it when I tried to send an e-mail from my smartphone and was informed that my login information was invalid. I then attempted to go to my account via webmail. I successfully logged onto Verizon.net and could access all of my services except e-mail, which came back with a gobbled error message.
My first response was my e-mail login info had been corrupted, so I changed by password on the Web version and my smartphone. No luck. I would like to be able to tell you that when I did get service back at 2:30 EDT this was a case of no harm no foul. Unfortunately, such is not the case. All of my sent and stored messages are gone off their server. Guess it was a good thing I downloaded everything to Outlook last night.
Here is what others have experienced as this is written (click for larger images).
Source (News - Alert): www.isitdownrightnow.com
Source: Twitter (News - Alert) under Verizon e-mail outage
For those of you who have followed the multiple articles I have written on the spate of recent outages that have hit Microsoft (News - Alert), Google, Twitter, Intermedia, etc., you are going to find my frustration about having a lack of information on the web and the inability to talk to somebody a broken record. However, it is one whose repetition is important. It seems that nobody in the telecom or tech industry understands how to keep customers informed when bad things happen.
Without an explanation as to why the e-mail servers have been malfunctioning, it would be foolish to speculate as to whether this is systems failure, human error or whether Verizon is in the midst of a cyber attack. This would include trying not to jump to the conclusion that this is reprisal for Verizon’s involvement in the NSA scandal where leaker Edward Snowden’s first leaks fingered the company as cooperating with the intelligence community on gathering phone records of U.S. citizens.
Obviously we will wait for further clarification from Verizon as to what happened. In the meantime, for those of you who have suffered during what is now a prolonged outage, all I can say is that I feel your pain and hope you off-loaded you mail to your PC.
Check back with us as details become available.
