PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- Customers were angered on Sunday as Cox Communications labored to restore a weekend-long email outage affecting accounts in Rhode Island and other parts of the country.
A Cox spokeswoman said Sunday afternoon that the problem is not expected to be fixed today.
Comments posted to the company's Facebook page show growing dissatisfaction with the outage, now in its third day.
Providence Journal readers are tweeting us about the outage and commenting on our Facebook page:
@projo with #coxemaildown I would guess I have been out for about 2 days now ?? Greenville R.I. ....no time yet for problem solved
— steve h (@hemi122249) December 16, 2012
@projo #coxemaildown in Cranston since Friday afternoon: (
— Dawn Giarrusso (@kirbsters) December 16, 2012
@projo Yes, since Friday night..... Norfolk, VA.#coxemaildown
— Crunch This (@CrunchThis12) December 16, 2012
@projo Lost Cox email sometime Friday night here in Pawtucket #coxemaildown
— Tim Fitzpatrick (@fittim70) December 16, 2012
@projoalmost 2 days in Cumberland #coxemaildown
— Marisa (@aearmir) December 16, 2012
@projo Cox e-mail down in Coventry, RI since Friday. Gives new meaning to snail mail. #coxemaildown
— Martha Young (@MarthaAYoung) December 16, 2012
@projo @coxcomm Haven't had e-mail since Friday morning. I don't know what I'm missing. Hopefully nothing important.#coxemaildown
— Daten (@Datenben) December 16, 2012
Cox's director of communications, Dana Alexander Nolfe, said in an e-mail Sunday afternoon to The Journal:
"Our teams are making progress in our email service restoration efforts. Through our investigation, we have isolated the cause of the failure to the email system platform which ultimately affected both the primary and secondary failover (back-up) systems. Currently, all incoming messages are queued in our system and we expect to deliver messages to customers on a rolling basis as we bring the systems back online.
Teams across all levels of our organization remain intensely focused on the restoration efforts. Unfortunately, we do not expect services to be restored today. We do understand the impact this is having on our customers, which is why we have deployed every resource possible to working this issue. While we are focused on restoring email access as quickly as possible, the multiple components and processes that make up our email system require care, and some time, to bring them back online."
This notice appeared on the Cox website at 9:30 a.m. Sunday:
"Our teams continue to make progress in restoring email service to our customers in the 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. At this time we cannot provide an estimated time for recovery, but will continue to work around the clock until email service is restored."
Are you experiencing issues with your Cox e-mail? How long and where are you located? Tweet @projo with #coxemaildown or let us know in the comments.
-- An earlier version of this report was published at 11:17 a.m. and updated at 12:30 p.m., 2:10 p.m. and 3:50 p.m.