AOL is suffering an email outage Friday that is affecting customers across the country.

While some users report having no access, others have seen spotty access to AOL email during the morning hours Friday.

The number of complaints regarding AOL email on Down Detector have been spiking over the past couple of hours, with the concentration of complaints heaviest in regions such as southern California, up and down the East Coast, and across Florida.

AOL was acquired by Verizon in June 2015. Last year, Verizon announced it was shutting down its email business and providing those customers with an option with AOL that allowed its internet service customers retain their Verizon.net email addresses, or helping them transition to another email provider. 

On Friday, AOL acknowledged via its customer service handle on Twitter that it’s aware of the service issue and that engineers are working on a fix, but has not elaborated on the root cause.

Our top priority right now is getting you connected with AOL Mail. We appreciate your diligence and patience during this issue.

— AOL Customer Support (@AOLSupportHelp) March 2, 2018

We appreciate your patience while we are working on a fix. Our engineers are still investigating while AOL Mail is inaccessible for some of our users. We'll keep you posted once we have an update.

— AOL Customer Support (@AOLSupportHelp) March 2, 2018

We’re aware that service is slow/inaccessible for some of our users when trying to access AOL Mail. We are working to fix it as quickly as possible. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience.

— AOL Customer Support (@AOLSupportHelp) March 2, 2018

Update: At 1:28 p.m. ET AOL tweeted that email services were back online: 

Update! AOL services are now working. We appreciate your patience.

— AOL Customer Support (@AOLSupportHelp) March 2, 2018

Synacor has expanded its relationship with Windstream in the form of a multi-year agreement to provide hosted email for the service provider.

Financial terms were not announced, but the hosted agreement also includes email monetization via way of advertising. The agreement also broadens Synacor’s deal with Windstream, which has already been a portal customer of Synacor’s.

The Windstream deal also expands Synacor’s email and messaging business. Synacor acquired Zimbra, a provider of open source-based email, messaging and collaboration software, in 2015.

RELATED: Synacor Snares Zimbra

Notably, Windstream is outsourcing its email needs to Synacor as another major ISP, Verizon, shifts gears. As reported last week, Verizon is closing down its email business, but, as part of the transition, will provide its broadband customers with an option to retain their Verizon.net email addresses via AOL, which Verizon acquired in mid-2015, or shift to a different provider such as Google, Yahoo or Live Mail. Verizon, which acknowledged that there are “more capable email platforms out there,” is also in the process of acquiring certain Yahoo Internet assets, so it will soon have two major email platforms at its disposal.

RELATED: Verizon Dropping Its Email Business

Himesh Bhise, Synacor’s CEO, said there are still major synergies between email and portal products, as together they drive engagement, traffic and monetization.

“Rumors of the demise of email are greatly exaggerated,” he said, noting that it’s still a key tool for marketing, advertising, and customer retention. “Fundamentally, it’s going to continue to be an important platform.”

Bhise said Synacor won about 300 new small and medium business contracts for the licensing of Zimbra’s email software. Bhise also estimates that Synacor has about 500 million mailboxes on Zimbra’s platform worldwide.

As for future email-facing growth, he sees it coming from both consumer ISP and enterprise segments through direct sales and via Synacor’s reseller channels.

In a recent whitepaper focused on the email business, Synacor holds that ISPs should view inactive email accounts “as the lowest hanging of all potential fruit -- they have already walked through your door, you just have to turn on the lights and give them more of a reason to stick around.”

Synacor also believes that it’s not too late to drive consumer usage of ISP email, despite the popularity of “free” email services from sources such as Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail.

Verizon has decided to close down its email business, but will provide an option with corporate cousin AOL that will let its Internet service customers retain their Verizon.net email addresses for no added charge.  

Verizon has posted an FAQ about the transition plan, noting that customers will be alerted with an “Email service notice” when they must decide to keep their existing Verizon.net addresses using AOL’s platform, or shift to a different provider such as Google, Yahoo or Live Mail. The FAQ does not say when Verizon intends to finish the migration plan. The company has been asked for additional comment. Verizon ended 2016 with 7.03 million total broadband connections, including 5.65 million Fios Internet customers.

UPDATE: Verizon has not pinpointed when it expects to complete the migration, but confirmed that the migration will be occurring over the next few months, meaning that not all customers have been notified. Once they are notified, customers will have 30 days to take action.

Verizon, which acquired AOL in mid-2015 and is in the process of acquiring certain Yahoo Internet assets, explained in the FAQ that it ultimately decided “that there are more capable email platforms out there.”

RELATED: Verizon, Yahoo Agree to Slash Merger Price by $350M

By closing down its email business, the company added, Verizon can “focus our energies in providing you with the best in Internet and TV experiences,” adding that the change to the email accounts won’t impact other Verizon services used by those customers.

In the wake of that decision, Verizon outlines the aforementioned two options to subs – to keep their existing email address or download their email, contact and calendar info and move them to a provider of their choice.

For customers with multiple Verizon.net email addresses, they’ll need to make decisions for each email account.

Those that go with the AOL Mail, can keep their email address and get some features associated with that service, including more storage, access to spam filters and virus protection, and the ability to send texts and instant messages from the email inbox, and send email attachments up to 25 megabytes in size. The AOL Mail migration could “take several hours” to complete.

According to the FAQ, users will eventually no longer be able to receive or send email using their Verizon.net email address if they do not take any action at all. Verizon stresses that after 180 days of inactivity it will move to delete the account, as it will help the company “reduce our server storage needs and electrical consumption.”

WASHINGTON — The American Cable Association and the National Cable & Telecommunications Association are looking to save some trees — and themselves some green in the process.

In a request for declaratory ruling from the Media Bureau last week, the associations asked the FCC to declare that emails to subscribers for whom operators have a working email address can replace the “hundreds of millions of pages of paper” it requires annually to fulfill the FCC requirement for routine customer notifications oth at the time of a service’s purchase and at any other time upon request.

Those would include individual notices of how much a customer pays in rental fees for leased set-tops, prices and programming tier options, installation and maintenance policies, and more.

Most operators still provide a snail mail hard copy of information that MVPDs say “few subscribers read and virtually none retain.”

Making the requirement electronic, the organizations said, would help the environment, while modernizing the rules and speeding notices and updates. They also argued it would allow their members “greater flexibility to match the electronic operations of their online and other competitors.”

As precedent for the move away from paper, they pointed to the FCC’s decision to require TV stations and MVPD public files to be made available online in an FCC database rather than mandating them to keep hard copies at their main studios.

The Sierra Club has estimated that one tree translates to 10,000-20,000 pages, so let’s just say that if the trees could talk, after advising Clint Eastwood to take singing lessons, thousands of them would be saying thank you to the FCC and cable operators.

Click here to uncover the Clint Eastwood movie reference.

Comcast confirmed that it has contacted about 200,000 broadband subs to secure their MSO-supplied email accounts and reset their passwords after discovering that a Dark Web seller was trying to unload a list of almost 600,000 Comcast email addresses and passwords.

CSO Online, which first reported on the Dark Web sale, said the seller was hawking batches of 100,000 accounts for $300 each, but the final price was $1,000.

A Comcast official said about 30% of the 590,000 records being sold were active, (Comcast ended the third quarter of 2015 with 22.86 million residential high-speed Internet subs). In addition to accessing email, subscribers use those credentials to access TV Everywhere services.

Comcast has not pinned down the exact source of the information being sold -- the data could have been harvested outside of Comcast’s systems via phishing, malware and other schemes.

“We do know that it was not from us,” the official said, noting that Comcast is contacting impacted subscribers about resetting their passwords. “It was not a breach of our system.”

According to CSO Online, commenters speculated that the Comcast list was “recycled information,” and tagged the Dark Web seller as a “scammer.”

Though Comcast said the information that showed up on Dark Web was not sourced though a breach of its systems, cybersecurity has become a critical area of emphasis for the cable industry. At last month’s SCTE Cable-Tec Expo, organizers dedicated a full day to the topic.

John N. Stewart, the senior vice president and chief security and trust officer at Cisco Systems, keynoted that pre-show Cybersecurity Symposium, noting that cybersecurity threats are a big, if not the biggest, risk posed to cable’s internal and external activities.

During his talk, Stewart presented data from a recent PricewaterhouseCoopers survey that found that about 90% of “large” organizations suffered a security breach, 50% of the worst breaches were caused by inadvertent human error, and 69% of large organizations were attacked by an unauthorized outsider. Another problem, he said, is that most companies aren’t aware that they are under attack when it happens. Stewart said that 269 days is the average “time-to-detection” rate for many businesses.

“I would call that not winning,” he said, later citing a study showing that 50% of CEOs of companies with at least $500 million in revenues in 10 major economies said they were not prepared for a “major cyber event.”

Of recent note, Cox Communications agreed to pay $595,000 to settle an FCC investigation into its data protections related to a 2014 hack.  

Synacor said it will put up $24.5 million to acquire “certain assets” of Zimbra, a major provider of open source-based email, messaging and collaboration software that counts customers such as Comcast, Vodafone, Emerson, Red Hat and H&R Block.

Synacor, which expects the deal to close within 45 days, said the deal is comprised of $17.3 million in cash and the issuing of 3 million shares, 600,000 warrants (priced at $4 per share), and paying up to $2 million in earn-outs over the next 18 months.

About 140 employees will join Synacor, expanding that total to about 400, an official said.

The deal comes soon after Synacor announced that MTS, a top telecom provider in Manitoba, tapped Synacor’s Cloud Email Platform to support the MTS Mail email service. It also comes about eight months after Synacor shored up its OTT focus via the acquisition of NimbleTV.

Synacor, which also specializes in TV Everywhere authentication systems and develops customized Web portal and metadata services also works with customers such as Mediacom Communications, BendBroadband (now part of TDS Telecom), Buckeye CableSystem, Google Fiber, CenturyLink, Cable One, Charter Communications , Suddenlink Communications, WideOpenWest, Surewest Communications, Verizon Communications, and Sling TV.

“Email has been and continues to be important to our internet service provider customers, and has been a double-digit growth business for Synacor this year, driving portal traffic and monetization,” said Synacor CEO Himesh Bhise, in a statement. “We now have an even more compelling value proposition offering Zimbra’s on-premise technology as well as Synacor’s managed service solutions and advertising products.”

Synacor said the acquisition will make it the largest provider of ISP email solutions in the U.S., noting that Zimbra serves more than 120 ISP and CSP customers around the world. Zimbra also works with more than 1,000 value-added resellers and 500-plus hosting providers.

The acquisition will also accelerate Synacor’s plans to expand its portal, video and advertising products outside the U.S., the company said.

In the wake of the deal, Synacor raised its full-year financial guidance to reflect Zimbra contributions, expecting full year 2015 revenue of $102 million to $108 million, up from $97 million to $102 million. Expected adjusted EBITDA rises to $4 million to $6 million, from $3.5 million to $5 million.