E-mail brownouts are a recurring event. Last August, just days after an AOL executive assured reporters that it was immune to nationwide outages, AOL made headlines when the entire service went down for 19 hours. In tests I conducted up to July 17, the mail rarely arrived in less than eight hours. Mailing list subscribers reported delays of several days. The service is also plagued by unreported mini-outages affecting subsets of subscribers or parts of the service.
Life goes on and everything's fine.
AOL may be a masterpiece of marketing, but after nearly a decade of deficit-financed growth, it needs to morph into profitability, and soon. Last September it abandoned its dubious accounting practice that had marketing and promotion expenses treated as assets. And those expenses are huge. Besides leaving them strapped for capacity, it has left them even further strapped for cash. At least one recent advertising deal on AOL, with Tel-Save, included provisions for a cash advance.