Around 7:30 a.m. EDT this morning, the servers for our comcast.net email system, or SmartZone, experienced some technical problems which have now been resolved. This issue impacted customers’ ability to access the SmartZone system, which provides customers with their email and address book. This issue did not affect our customers’ ability to access the Internet. It’s important to point out that no customer emails were lost in this process, however it may take several hours for customers who were impacted to receive their old email. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. Our engineers have been working all day to restore this service, which was our priority.
We’ve been providing updates to customers on web forums and Twitter throughout the day. Earlier today we told customers that we expected service to be restored by mid-day, however, the process took longer than expected. We thank our customers for your patience while we sorted this out and again apologize for the inconvenience.
Update 4/5/09 3:30pm: Earlier today, some SmartZone users were having trouble connecting to their email using POP (a protocol that some email clients use). Separately, some SmartZone users experienced delays in password resets updating. Both issues have been resolved.
Update 4/6/09 5:10pm: We wanted to provide an update on the SmartZone outage on Saturday. Again, we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience our customers may have had and to let them know we're taking this very seriously. Our engineers continue to investigate and today we're working with a very small number of customers on a one-on-one basis to address specific questions.
Our priority has been to bring the servers back online, which we have, and to ensure the email system is running smoothly again, which it is. We're conducting a root cause analysis and will post the details here as soon as we are able. Thanks in advance for your patience.