I’ve had a couple of my friends have their AOL Instant Messenger® screen name stop working for no apparent reason. Has AOL been suspending screen names arbitrarily? Is it some kind of snafu? One friend tried calling tech support, but they apparently didn’t speak English very well and played the phone transfer game. So does anybody actually know what’s happening? Anyone here been having the same problem?
AIM has been working fine for me.
What do you mean by “stop working for no apparent reason”? Can they sign on? Do you see them in your Buddy List? What happens when you try and IM them?
AOL does not arbitrarily suspend screen names. If a screen name is suspended it is either because of a TOS violation or billing issue(if it is a paying members screen name)
I used to work in the NOC at AOL and know that AIM rarely goes down* and if it does go down it usually is back up pretty quickly.
Slee
*AIM, chat and email are the Holy Trinity at AOL. If one of those go down members absolutely freak out. Those problems get fixed really quickly.
I had a problem a few weeks back. I couldn’t sign into the name I usually used, but it connected fine with other names. This only lasted probably a couple hours, and as far as I know that’s the only time it’s happened to me…at least in the past couple years.
Sorry, let me clarify. They can’t log into their screen name at all. They’ve had to create new screen names to be able to log in. This isn’t just a few isolated incidents, either:
See here and here
Yea, this has happened to me, about 2 days ago. My account is “temporarily suspended”, whatever that means. I had another account that I hadn’t used in 3-odd years or so, so I fired that up and it worked fine. Sorry, no answers…
Well, 17 reports out of ~30 million AIM users is, IMHO, a few isolated incidents.
I IM’ed a couple of my friends at AOL in the NOC and they did not know of anything technical going on with AIM. I’d bet it is probably a TOS issue though I don’t know that for sure. Or it is possible that the accounts got comprimised and were shut down for that reason.
Slee
Word is around here (Rochester Institute of Technology) that AOL is suspending the accounts of people who have copyrighted files (MP3s, mostly) in their AIM file shares. A coworker of mine was rapidly unsharing MP3s today after her friend’s account got the axe.
I couldn’t log into AIM for most of today, and I have no MP3s anywhere on my computer.
Yeah, that would(probably) do it. I believe that companies can be held legally liable for what goes over their network, though IANAL. I know that the operations securuty people at AOL were extremely concerned about porn (especially child porn) when I worked there. At that time MP3s weren’t really an issue but I can certainly believe that sharing copywrited MP3s or other files will get you tossed. If a record company decided to sue a user who shared MP3s through AOL they’d probably sue AOL as well in the “sue everybody and see what happens” world we live in.
Don’t know for sure what happened but I know AOL doesn’t arbitrarily ban people. There has to be a reason*.
Slee
*There is a slight possibilty that something tecnhical went wrong and some accounts got banned by accident/mistake but I would probably know about it after asking.
This just happened to me. I have been blocked for the past three days. Does any one know when they are expected to have fixed this problem by? Is there someone I am supposed to e-mail to let know I am one of the group.
I already went to the report a problem link on their website. But it specifically says not to expect any confirmation from them, and I am not entirely sure I did it right. Is there a point where I should worry if my screen name hasn’t been fixed yet?