If Optimum Online Email Goes Down And Cablevision Doesn’t Tell Me…
It’s like the old joke: If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? In this case if Cablevision’s Optimum Online email service goes down and they don’t say a thing about it to customers, is it a non issue?
For almost a full day now I’ve been unable to access my optimum online email account getting a “Service Temporarily Unavailable” error message (among other types of error messages I received throughout the day) every time I tried to log in with my Mozilla Thunderbird email client. Initially I thought that it was my email program so I hopped on over to the optimum online webpage to check email through the web based email. Turned out I couldn’t get in through that route either. Nothing on the website alerted me to there being a problem so I went about the rest of my day thinking it was just a glitch that would be resolved soon enough.
Since I had a concert to go to last night I was pretty much unplugged all evening and I didn’t even try to check email until this morning. I thought I’d be treated to a whole slew of unread email when I logged in this morning but lo and behold, nothing. Same error message. Again I hopped on over to the web to see if I could check email that way and again, no go. Curiously the Optonline website has no messages, no alerts, nothing to signify that there is an ongoing problem with their webmail system. I had to do a Google search and find a couple of small article on websites I’d never even read before to find out that another person in the universe is having the same problem as me.
Perhaps it’s not that big of a deal but you’d think Cablevision (the company that owns Optonline) would have let out some sort of press release or at the least put a message on their website alerting people to a problem and saying they’re working on it. Isn’t that PR 101 for any company these days? It takes nothing just to acknowledge there’s a problem and that you as a company are aware of it. Especially since the front page of the website where I can log into email has a large news window right there on the front page. Lots of stuff going on there but absolutely nothing about the email server in their own company being down.
I see this as a big failure on the part of Cablevision. When I try to call customer service the line is constantly busy, which makes me think that many, many others are also experiencing the same problem and calling up to complain. It doesn’t make sense that the company would go almost a full day without even a peep on their website that there’s a problem.
Update: I found this Yahoo Answers conversation about the Optonline email issue too.
Update 2: This is funny. Optonline has an important announcement section on the front page. Last update as of 10:57AM on July 16, 2010 even after 24 hours of email outage… April. Really?
Update 3: Finally. I found this at about 12:30PM. Cablevision released the following statement which is a link from their important announcement section:
Cablevision is experiencing technical issues that have resulted in email delays and email access issues for some customers. We have located the problem and expect to resolve the matter as quickly as possible. We apologize for any inconvenience to our customers, and we will update this announcement as more information becomes available.
Update 4: At about 12:50PM I got a few emails that came through my email client but they were sporatic and random. Went to the Optonline website and click on the web access to email and got the following alert.