Cox Communications continued to work Sunday to recover from an email system failure affecting residential broadband customers on the East Coast and in the Midwest that occurred Friday evening, but said it did not expect to resolve the issue before Monday.
Cox’s email service for users in those areas stopped functioning at about 5 p.m. Eastern on Dec. 14.
The operator said it isolated the cause to an issue in the storage platform that supports Cox residential email in service areas in its Midwest and East Coast regions.
“Teams across all levels of our organization are focused on the recovery and we truly apologize for the inconvenience this has caused,” Cox director of media relations Todd Smith said in an email. “At this time we cannot provide an estimated time for recovery, but will continue to work around the clock until email service is restored.”
There is no indication the outage is due to a security breach or any form of cyber-attack, according to Smith. Cox Business services are unaffected by the email issue, he said.
Incoming messages for affected Cox subscribers are being stored and should be available when service is fully operational, Smith said.
Cox customers vented their frustration with the situation on social media networks and on the MSO’s technical support forum.
“#coxcomm #cox email outage continues. Now at 38 hours and counting,” Broadbandtrends analyst Teresa Mastrangelo said in a message posted on Twitter Sunday at 7:08 a.m. Eastern. “For a major ISP this is unacceptable.”
According to Cox, while its email infrastructure includes multiple levels of support designed to ensure reliability, the outage affected the primary and secondary failover (backup) systems.
