What better day to have EarthLink Webmail go down, but on Earthday. Sounds like some upset employees planned an “Office Space-esque” prank that worked. The outage occurred early Wednesday morning knocking out Earthlink servers, web pages, phones and email/twitter accounts.
EarthLink, which provides service to an estimated 2.8 million subscribers around the United States, offers everything from dial-up to voice-over-IP services. I don’t know too many people who use Earthlink and I don’t think it will cause any major problems. I honestly didn’t even know this company was still around.
Founded in 1994 by 23 year-old Sky Dayton, EarthLink has been on a slow downfall since the dotcom bust. They merged and bought out a few companies since then, but haven’t been able to hold a steady position in the web world since. Hopefully this EarthDay meltdown can spark some sort of interest again…but that doesn’t look to promising either.
We have been longtime users of Earthlink and I used to really like them because I thought they were reliable and had good customer service, both of which have been slipping over the last couple of years and now we’re without our websites and our email all day and I’m thinking it’s time to make a change. This really stinks. I can’t believe it’s a prank and whoever did this should realize how many lives and livelihoods they are affecting. Thanks for writing about this!
I’ve been an Earthlink since 1999 and have found them to be a much eaiser ISP than most. Customer service slipped when they went off shore for level 1 & 2 service.
I use Outlook for my email and was not without service at all. However, I was not able to access the webmail page to check spam folder and there were a few emails I needed. I’m not sure why it went down, but if it was a prank I hope they find the one(s) that pulled it.
I think EarthLink’s Domain Name Servers (DNS) crashed. I reconfigured my home router to use OpenDNS, restarted my network, rebooted all the machines, and was back on line in a short time, even able to retrieve my EarthLink mail. This would only have continued to be a problem for customers who use EarthLink’s default DNS or opt-out DNS settings with their DSL or broadband equipment.
I’ve had earthlink for years. I tried to cancel a few times but they talked me into cheap plans and it’s also a pain to change my email address everywhere, so I’ve kept it. I’ve hardly ever had any problems with them at all.
It’s been out most of April 22 and also part of today April 23, 2009, and it just stopped working again a few minutes ago. I hope this gets fixed soon. How do you know it was earthlink staff people? I’m trying to find the real story as to what’s going on.
It was a power outage in Pasadena. No pranks pulled.
I have an HP computer and I’m running Windows XP on it. For some time when I turn it on, I get a message that says “DMA Scheduler.exe.ordinal not found. The ordinal 181 is not in the dynamic link library PX.dll.”
Earthlink Webmail http://apusa.us/earthlink-webmail-3887/