Email Outage Update 6:10pm December 16

Good, all messeges received since Friday are still out there in cyberland. Now, when it's finally restored, I can get the email from my professor telling me that my final exam that had to be submitted by 11:59 PM Friday (and could only be accepted through my Cox email which had been verified as my account) was never received and that unfortunately, since there are NO exceptions as final grades were required by the college by Saturday, I can't make it up.

Thank you Cox.

Thanks so much for the update. I just wanted to say that in the grand scheme of things, it is inconvenient not to be able to receive email, however, I don't think it will knock the earth off its axis.   I appreciate all the hard work you all are doing and know that while it's frustrating for us customers it must be insanely frustrating for the people trying to correct the problem. 

Thank you again and I will keep my fingers crossed.

Cox Internet will be turned off in my house on Tuesday. AT&T has better prices and better service. I'm sure Cox won't care, they don't seem to be in the "customer first" business. 

It may not bother you Katy, it makes me get a zero on my final exam in one of my college classes. GPA suffers. I'm not happy. It's good for you that you are only annoyed, this affects other peoples lives though.

This little email fiasco will be a permanent of my GPA due to that ZERO for that final, due to this outage that they haven't explained yet.

Jsweat....you may want to investigate AT&T further.....If you have a land line added to your bundle, they allow 250 minutes per month (yes, that is for your land line) and if you think Cox has bad customer service, their customer service is worse.  Please check it out

Have you tried to contact your professor?  You may not be the only student that uses Cox email.  Plus, there is plenty of proof that there is no way you could control this problem.  Give it a try!

I Mite join AT&T Too.

If your school won't accept that cox had a major email issue that wouldn't allow you do your final, I think I'd find a new school after finding an attorney. Must be a LIBERAL "Proffessor".

Will the servers be stood up by zone (states) or is there an alternative execution plan?

How about some transparency?  What happened?

I would like to get an idea of the cause of the outage?  Hackers? HW failure?  Staff failure?  That will also help me believe (or not) assertions that nothing has been compromised.

In any event - this is a good nudge to set up email on another service. It is helpful in such an outage (except for the reasons in the email chain, and emails you can't reach because they are hung up in the ethers somewhere) as well if you decide to switch providers.

I also caution about Verizon.  A friend lost total internet connectivity for his business for two days last week.

@patticake

You just hit the nail on the head. Trying to find someone that actually provides decent customer service (I said decent, not even good CS) in this business is next to impossible. Piles of complaints to the FCC, your Federal and State representatives and your state utility authority may help, but who knows how much money Cox and the others spend greasing the wheels in all of these areas.

Yes, that would be the same money they could spend on a better infrastructure.

The failure of Cox's RESIDENTIAL e-mail for this amount of time and the explanations offered by "Frankie" are both unacceptable. This is a widespread and prolonged outage that affects customers in ELEVEN states. Obviously, Cox's infrastructure and contingency plans are grossly inadequate and ineffective. If the actual cause is a cyber attack, we, as Cox customers, will realize it when we are alerted by our banking institutions, credit card companies and other businesses alert us of possible identity fraud. 

There has been discussion as to how customers are exaggerating the impact of the e-mail failure. For customers who try to retrieve a password from an online account that was set up with their x.cox.net address it would be a major inconvenience that wouldn't be circumvented by creating or reverting to a gmail, et. al. account. For customers who have multiple e-mail accounts yet communicate with certain people exclusively through their Cox e-mail, the timeliness of those messages will be lost. (Remember that e-mail and text messaging are an integral and essential means of communication today that we pay for and expect. This is not 1962 - our communication is not centered around the rotary-dial telephone and the mailman.) For customers who receive special offers during this holiday season from merchants it would be a minor inconvenience, but one that might preclude them from saving money on a purchase. So, is the impact exaggerated? If, for over 2 days, you couldn't send or receive "free" text messages on your cell phone despite the fact that you paid your service provider, wouldn't you feel entitled to "whine"?

Notwithstanding these repercussions, the question at hand for all Cox customers is how to proceed in light of this event. I have been a Cox customer for about 20 years but I am seriously considering how inept this company is in dealing with this situation and how tempting it is to switch providers. Cox, like many businesses today, have no appreciation for customer loyalty. NEW subscribers to their services are entitled to the best deals - not us. For instance, new subscribers receive a bundle discount of $10 per month for 12 months in the RI service area. As a company that has over $9 BILLION in revenue, I believe that the minimum response (perhaps not even the most equitable) from Cox to mitigate this situation and prevent its customers from running to their competition would be to extend that offer to all of the customers affected by this fiasco. In most cases, this would only amount to about a 10% discount - from a company that has a profit margin of at least 60% (across the board) yet can't offer reliable service. 

Only when the bill comes due does the customer ever come first..

Jsweat said:
...I'm sure Cox won't care, they don't seem to be in the "customer first" business.

Cox, please explain to me why I have to pay for cox business access to get decent service!