Outage at AOL Pulls the Plug on 6 Million Subscribers

America Online Inc., which more than 6 million people now rely upon for electronic mail, online discussion groups, news and access to the Internet, suffered a disastrous network-wide outage for nearly 19 hours Wednesday.

The network finally resumed operation late Wednesday evening, but not before leaving angry subscribers muttering--and marveling--at how dependent they have become on computer communications.

The problem began at 1 a.m. Pacific time, when Vienna, Va.-based AOL turned its network off to perform a routine software upgrade and was unable to get it running again.

AOL spokeswoman Pam McGraw said the problem was different from a software glitch that brought down America Online’s e-mail system for an hour on June 19. This time, it involved new host software, essential to the network’s operating systems.

“We know it’s a huge inconvenience and we want to compensate our members for the time they’ve not been able to get online,” she said.

Failures are not that uncommon on complex computer networks such as AOL, which use an array of large computers and communications systems to manage e-mail traffic, discussion groups and--in AOL’s case--a broad array of information services. Netcom On-Line Communications, which unlike AOL provides access only to the public Internet, was down for 13 hours in June, and CompuServe and Microsoft Network have also experienced outages.

But the AOL failure was far more dramatic, in part because of its duration but mainly because of the huge number of affected subscribers. All across the country Wednesday, people who have come to rely on the service fumed as their professional and personal lives were disrupted.

“A lot of people communicate with me via e-mail every day; it’s a major part of my communications and when it’s down, I’m shut off,” said Robert Agee, a managing editor at SIMBA publications in Costa Mesa. “For e-mail and online access to be truly effective, it needs to be as reliable as the phone network.”

“I’m irked,” said John Taylor, a managing director of Arcadia Investment in Portland, Ore., who said he had previously spent hours programming his computer to automatically retrieve his e-mail from AOL to increase his work efficiency. On Wednesday, that convenience turned into a nightmare as AOL’s computers kept disconnecting Taylor’s modem and causing his desktop computer to crash each time.

AOL issued a statement early Wednesday saying service would be restored Wednesday afternoon. But subscribers attempting to dial in during the afternoon were met with an on-screen message that told them to try again in 15 minutes. The service finally resumed operations shortly before 8 p.m. Pacific time.

The AOL outage underscored a reliability issue that has increasingly plagued the computer industry over the last few years: As non-techie consumers are persuaded to buy computers and plunge into cyberspace, the expectations of customers change. While computer mavens are used to bugs and system crashes, many consumers expect a service like AOL to be as rock-solid as the telephone network.

Wednesday’s incident comes at a particularly bad time for AOL, which has suffered a string of setbacks in recent months. The company’s former president, William Razzouk, resigned in June after four months on the job, and the company has been feeling the heat from lower-cost Internet access providers.

Subscriber growth slowed during the last quarter, and this spring AOL began offering an optional value-priced plan in response to the Internet competition. The company, whose share price has been falling for months, is scheduled to report fourth-quarter earnings today.

Still, Rod Kuckro, editor of the Washington-based newsletter Information & Interactive Services Report, said earlier Wednesday that AOL will probably weather the storm.

But Kuckro warned that “this could be a litmus test” for online service providers who don’t make their systems more reliable.

For online fanatics like Jeff Richards, a Washington-based marketing executive who has eight e-mail addresses, outages are a reminder that online redundancy can mean the difference between keeping the lines of communication open and being in the dark.

“I think there are probably going to be more and more outages happening as more people come online,” Richards said. “For the most part, I have found America Online to be pretty reliable. But you can never be too careful.”

Times wire services contributed to this report.