Skip Links

Network World

  • Social Web 
  • Email 
  • Close

(Comma separation for multiple addresses)
Your Message:

Charter Communications deletes 14,000 e-mail accounts

Cable operator apologizes to customers, offers $50 credits
By Brad Reed , Network World , 01/24/2008
  • Share/Email
  • Tweet This
  • Comment
  • Print

Charter Communications acknowledged today that it had inadvertently deleted about 14,000 of its customers' e-mail accounts.

Charter spokesperson Anita Lamont says the deletions occurred during a routine maintenance of e-mail accounts this past Monday that involved deleting e-mails from accounts that had not been accessed in more than three months. However, roughly 14,000 active accounts were accidentally swept up with the inactive accounts and were permanently deleted. It was only when complaint calls of missing e-mails began swarming in, Lamont says, that the company became aware of the problem.

Charter has apologized to its customers and has offered each affected customer a $50 account credit. Additionally, the company says nothing like this has ever happened before, and has vowed to implement different maintenance procedures to prevent similar mass-deletions. In the future, the company says it will store e-mails from inactive accounts on a separate server for a limited period of time. This way, if Charter's engineering team accidentally snares active e-mail accounts again, it will be able to restore them with all of their files intact.

Charter has 5.7 million customers, including 2.6 million high-speed Internet subscribers, in 29 states.

  • Share/Email
  • Tweet This
  • Comment
  • Print

Comments (2)
Login
Forgot your account info?

RE: Charter Communications deletes 14,000 e-mail accountsBy Anonymous on January 31, 2008, 9:20 amThis happened to me....I lost all of my e-mails; I am currently going through a divorce and these were my records! I am livid about this; also, for the last 2...

Reply | Read entire comment

E-mail accountBy Anonymous on November 8, 2008, 11:26 amI had the occasion of taking the Charter announcement of accidently deleting E-mails (one was mine) and Charter claims that they never heard of this incident. Who...

Reply | Read entire comment

View all comments

Add comment
Anonymous comments subject to approval. Register here for member benefits.
Have a NetworkWorld account? Log in here. Register now for a free account.

Videos

rssRss Feed