If you've been wondering why your uncle from Watonga hasn't forwarded you any crazy chain emails over the weekend, don't worry, he didn't depart on a random trip to Kenya to find President Obama's original birth certificate. He simply doesn't have access to his Cox email account and can't remember his Hotmail password.
From NewsOK.com:
Thousands of Cox Communications customers across Oklahoma were without email Sunday because of an outage, company officials said.
The email storage platform that supports residential customers failed sometime Friday evening, causing all residential customers in the state to lose access to their incoming email, spokeswoman Kristin Peck said.
Peck could not give an estimated time for when the outage would be fully resolved, but said by 10 p.m. about 55 percent of customers had their service restored.
One customer, Greg Silver, of Oklahoma City, said he hasn't had Cox email since Friday.
“Email is such an integral part of people's lives now that being without it for several days is devastating,” he said in an email sent to NewsOK.com through a different account.
Tim Larson, of Oklahoma City, also reported the problem to NewsOK. He said, “Cox Webmail has now been down for almost two days. Luckily I'm on Yahoo!”
Congratulations, Tim Larson of Oklahoma City. You just became the first person in the history of mankind to utter the phrase "Luckily I'm on Yahoo." That would make a great epitaph. You should make it your own.
Anyway, you have to admit this whole story is kind of hysterical. If someone uses a Cox.com address as their primary email they probably deserve to have it taken away for a few days. As you're reading this, I bet one of the victims is opening Internet Explorer on their Gateway 2000 desktop to complain about the situation in an AOL chat room. Before they do, they better make sure they have Java installed.