Some FairPoint Communications customers in Maine and other states are reporting problems using their FairPoint email accounts this week.
A company spokeswoman in Portland said a limited number of customers using their FairPoint.net email addresses have experienced delays in sending and receiving emails since Tuesday.
A recorded message on a company helpline said Thursday that some FairPoint customers may be experiencing slower than normal times sending and receiving emails, as well as problems logging on to their accounts. The problem has affected users of both the Web email system and email clients such as Microsoft Outlook, the message said.
Barbara Alexander, who operates a public utilities consulting firm out of her Winthrop home, said she hasn’t had reliable access to the FairPoint email account she uses for her business since noon on Tuesday.
She said the email service has been going down intermittently and won’t let her log in. Alexander said she has clients all over the country, and she knows there were emails sent to her that didn’t come through until the service started working again Thursday morning. By later that morning, her email account was down again, she said.
Alexander said the outages were preventing her from serving her clients well.
“This is the longest outage of any major email provider I’ve ever heard of,” Alexander said.
Angelynne Amores Beaudry, the spokeswoman in Portland, said the company added additional servers Wednesday to deal with the problem and that technicians are continuing to try to solve it as soon as possible.
She said the company is still trying to pinpoint the problem. Asked whether there was a timeline when the issues may be resolved, Amores Beaudry said, “I can only say we are working as quickly as possible.”
Amores Beaudry said she’s heard of customers in Maine and New Hampshire with delays sending and receiving emails, but said she didn’t know what other states have customers affected by the issues. She didn’t know how many people have been affected.
On the company’s Facebook page, customers across the country, including Washington, Illinois and New York, reported email issues since at least Tuesday.
FairPoint provides customers in 17 states with communications services including phone, Internet and television services. It has the largest network in northern New England, according to its website.
Paul Koenig — 621-5663
Twitter: @paul_koenig
Send questions/comments to the editors.
