Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

As of approximately 4am EDT, Verizon customers began experience errors when trying to send and recieve email. The errors began as server timeouts but quickly moved to more ominous ones such as “Server Error: 0x800CCC90 Server Response: -ERR [SYS/PERM] Service Not Available.”  Users who attempted to log in at the Verizon.net website were met with startling errors such as “Sorry, your account does not exist on our servers.”  Things went even further south when the entire site fell off the net, replaced with this happy message:

Failure of server APACHE bridge:

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No backend server available for connection: timed out after 10 seconds or idempotent set to OFF.

Yep, it looks like their server crashed and died!  As I am a Verizon customer myself I called their tech support to find out what the story was.  The rep insisted everything was fine and blamed it on my computer.  Uh, no don’t think so. When your website is telling people there’s no server to connect to, you have definite problems!

As of 6:30am EDT POP mail was restored while website access is intermittent at best.  Slow, poorly formatted pages alternate with the APACHE failure message quoted above.  Mail on the POP side is trickling in and is delayed.  Users up and down the East Coast have been flooding DSLReports.com with outage reports, so the problem seems to be fairly widespread.

Mail and server outages seem to be a fairly regular occurrence these days yet Verizon refuses to acknowledge or apologize for the downtime.  The last update on their System Status page is from January.  What gives, Verizon?  Why don’t you want to communicate with your customers?