NEW YORK — Millions of AOL users encountered delays sending and receiving e-mail for several hours Thursday before the company identified and fixed a software glitch.
AOL spokesman Nicholas Graham said the company was still investigating the cause of the problems, which lasted from about 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Millions of messages had been stuck in a queue, he said, as users faced difficulties accessing their accounts, particularly through AOL's Web interfaces. About 500,000 messages were being released every minute, so the backlog was to be cleared by early evening, he said.
"Currently all queued e-mails sent by AOL members and individual Internet users during the temporary hiatus are being successfully delivered to e-mail inboxes," Graham said in a statement. "There is no longer any member impact on the AOL service from this rare and isolated incident."
The glitch affected both AOL.com e-mail for paid subscribers and its free AIM.com offering, which the Time Warner Inc. Internet unit began offering a year ago to lure nonsubscribers to its ad-supported sites.
As of March 31, AOL had 18.6 million subscribers in the United States. According to comScore Media Metrix, AOL had 43 million active users of its AIM instant-messaging service in April, all of whom are eligible for AIM.com e-mail accounts.
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