Cox Email Outage: Company Offers Refund For Lost Service

Cox Communications is offering customers a $5 refund for the inconvenience of the email service disruption last month.

Thousands of unhappy residential customers — some of whom made their feelings known on Facebook — had no email from December 14 to December 16 or 17. The email crash reportedly affected Arizona, Arkansas, Connecticut, Georgia, Florida, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, and Virginia subscribers. The Cox high-speed internet service operated normally during the email outage.

Customers have to contact Cox to request a refund for the email disruption which will appear on their next month’s billing statement; the refund is not being issued automatically to subscribers but is apparently assessed on a case-by-case basis.

Cox claimed that emails were buffered and all were delivered once the email service was brought back online. A Cox spokeswoman told NewsOK that the company deeply regretted the loss of service and that “Cox isolated the weekend failure to its primary and backup email system platforms, which are meant for residential customers. It is replacing the equipment and implementing measures to prevent a re-occurrence of these issues.” Cox previously indicated there was no security breach involved in the December email outage.

Cox serves about six million customers and provides digital cable television, internet, and digital telephone services.

If you are a Cox Communications customer, are you satisfied with the way “your friend in the digital age” responded to the recent major email system failure? If your email went down during this time, you think that a $5 refund is sufficient under the circumstances?