Cox e-mail outage hits all Arkansas users

Cox Communications experienced a weekend email outage for all Arkansas customers who use the cox.net email platform, according to Kelly Zega, a public affairs representative for the company.

The outage was reported “during the evening of Friday, December 14,” Zega said in a statement, lasting until “shortly before 6 p.m. ET on Sunday, Dec. 16.”

While Zega could not give the total number of subscribers because Cox does not share subscriber information, she confirmed the outage hit every Arkansas customer using the cox.net platform for email, while the Cox Business email customers along with standard Internet services were unaffected.

“The issue was within the email storage platform supporting Cox Residential Email for service areas in our Midwest and East Coast regions,” Zega explained. “Cox’s enterprise infrastructure exceeds industry standards and includes multiple levels of support designed to ensure reliability. Unfortunately, the outage affected the primary and secondary failover (back-up) systems.”

Zega added that Cox email service is supported by multiple servers. “As each server came back online, customers on that server were restored.”

Cox communicated the outage to customers through Facebook and via automated message at the main customer service number, Zega added.

“Now that service is restored Cox is moving forward with replacing email storage platform equipment and implementing measures to prevent a reoccurrence of these issues. We will remain intensely focused on this effort until all queued email messages are successfully delivered. Technical teams continue to be on high alert and monitoring systems closely.”

The company planned to continue sending undelivered queued messages through Wednesday (Dec. 19) and admitted that messages may not show up in the order they were received. Additionally, the Inbox view may not display an accurate date and time for when the message was sent. However, once the customer opens the message, the accurate date and time will be reflected in the Read Message view.

“Cox deeply regrets the impact this email outage has had on our customers, especially at a time when many are busy preparing for holiday celebrations with family and friends. We truly appreciated customers' patience as all of our resources were focused around the clock on the restoration effort. Moving forward, we will spare no cost to make sure the proper equipment is in place to make sure something like this doesn’t happen in the future.”