AOL Mail: Works for some, not for others

Who uses AOL Mail, you say? It turns out a lot of people, and many of them are more than a little angry that they can't log in today, as the Wall Street Journal, among others. A spokeswoman reportedly said that only 4 percent of users were affected.

Here's what the AOL Mail Blog is saying:

We're very sorry for the inconvenience,

We're in the midst of doing some scheduled maintenance on AOL Mail, and it's taking us a little longer than expected.

While we complete this maintenance, you may experience some inconsistencies with seeing older messages in your inbox or you may see a "Scheduled Maintenance" message when you attempt to login.

We'll update you here once the issue has been resolved. Until then, should you have any questions, please head over to our support forums.

I learned about the outage from an AOL Mail-using co-worker, and even though I don't use AOL Mail myself, I do keep an AOL AIM account active (while following most of the world into using Google Talk for most of my IM needs).

When I started up the Empathy instant-message client (the default IM application for the GNOME desktop environment I'm running in Debian Squeeze), AOL/AIM wouldn't log me in. (Note: I also have the cross-platform Pidgin IM client installed, but these days I'm using Empathy much more often — though for no good reason.)

A few minutes later I was able to log into AIM with no trouble. I also checked the e-mail account associated with it; I was able to log in just fine, though my AOL-loving (for the moment anyway) co-worker hasn't been so lucky thus far.

P.S. Notice how the title of this blog post doesn't read, "You (haven't) got mail"? That's because I'm trying to "stay classy," Ron Burgundy-style.

I think we can all agree that "Anchorman" is the best movie ever. Even in a world without AOL Mail: