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EE-gad! Orange webmail cut off in Blighty outage
UK telco says everything back to normal now
Everything Everywhere (EE) says it has resolved a problem that left many Orange customers in the UK unable to access their email accounts.
The telco did not say what caused the outage that customers say plagued them for more than two days, but service should now be restored.
"We have now resolved the issues preventing some Orange webmail users from accessing their accounts through an internet browser," an EE spokesperson told The Register. "We apologise to anyone affected for the inconvenience that this has caused."
Reg readers informed us of the problem Wednesday afternoon, complaining that they had been unable to access email on their Orange accounts. "Seems that EE are having major issues," our tipster said.
"Not least in not telling anyone about the problems with their Mail servers for the last 2 days."
Users on Twitter had similar gripes:
@orange had no access to my email for over 24 hours now and I can see many others have the same problem! Any idea when it'll be working?
— Sara Hampton (@shampsee) March 9, 2016
@orange 2nd day without email - what is happening and why don't you issue any response to all the complaints? #worstservice #noorangeemail
— Kath Shawcross (@KathShx) March 9, 2016
Monitoring site isitdownrightnow.com showed that the Orange.co.uk site was having problems Wednesday, with normal service returning at around 1900 UTC.
For those abroad wondering why problems on one telco's network would interrupt another's service, EE has been running Orange's UK brands as its own since agreeing in 2012 to a deal with both Orange and T-Mobile UK. Though EE no longer sells new Orange and T-Mobile connections, it continues to support subscribers.
Matters could get even more complicated soon, as BT has agreed to buy EE in a £12.5bn deal.
Hopefully, few if any of those Orange customers who have been suffering with the email outage were also unlucky enough to have a Panasonic smart TV. Those sets continue to be plagued by server connection problems, leaving customers unable to use many streaming TV services. ®