AOL outages and service status in Wells, England

Problems in the last 24 hours in Wells, England

The chart below shows the number of AOL reports we have received in the last 24 hours from users in Wells, England and surrounding areas. An outage is declared when the number of reports exceeds the baseline, represented by the red line.

Community Discussion

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AOL Issues Reports

Latest outage, problems and issue reports in social media:

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  Art 🇺🇲⚓ (@BeerAce73) reported 2 minutes ago

  @MapQuest MapQuest? Is that like AOL? Stupid *****.

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  John (@tobeawitness) reported 4 minutes ago

  @_TheLaundryMat This whole argument seems silly to me. I have personally used AI to complete projects in a month that probably would have taken me several years without it. The productivity gains from AI, even in its current form, are already enormous. Could there be a bubble in some AI stocks or company valuations? Absolutely. But that does not mean AI itself is a bubble. Think about AOL. Everyone remembers America Online. AOL is largely irrelevant today, but the internet certainly did not disappear with it. You are probably reading this on a computer or phone connected to the internet at speeds that make the old 56k modem look prehistoric. That is the distinction people are missing. During the internet boom, many companies were wildly overvalued and eventually disappeared. But the underlying technology was real, transformative, and ultimately became far bigger than people imagined. AI will likely follow a similar path. There will be winners and losers. Some companies will fail, and some investments will prove ridiculously overpriced. But AI itself is not going away, and neither is the massive computing and data-center infrastructure required to support it. The bubble, if there is one, is in certain valuations—not in the technology or the demand for it.

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  Ryan Clark (@ryan_theprofit) reported 4 minutes ago

  My dad replied to news about my girlfriend with a green check mark. Honestly, appropriate. Our generation only writes well over text because we had to get good at it to date. AOL Instant Messenger, then years of practice with the stakes turned all the way up. His generation never needed the skill, so they never built it. The thumbs up isn't him being short with you. It's the whole sentence.

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  Roger Douglas Ware (@RDWareEsqu1re) reported 5 minutes ago

  @mariza_hofer Desperate people, don't **** with them. They can't be predicted in any meaningful fashion. Imo. I was tech support for the world's first chat based communities. AOL and Prodigy and V.B.B.S. I can say this I got catfished once, and a 17 year relationship was the results. Favour of god to your unity with an equal and opposite force. My dignity is all that keeps me from flirtatious decorum. Will be looking for someone of quality to refer to you for inspection.

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  Paul Walsh (@Paul__Walsh) reported 7 minutes ago

  People keep asking why Apple allowed OpenAI to build a ChatGPT integration for Messages. Do get to the point, I don’t think Apple anticipated a company using the permissions required by ChatGPT specifically to read, analyse and store people’s Messages when the Messages app includes iMessage and not just SMS. The entire point of iMessage is that it’s rich media *and* end to end encrypted. The permissions OpenAI needs exist for legitimate software, and Apple warns people before granting them. Backup software needs Full Disk Access to back up protected files. Security software needs it to inspect files for malicious activity. Disk utilities need it to search, recover and manage protected files. It’s similar to WebView. It gave developers a way to display parts of an app that could change without requiring a new app release and App Store review, such as terms of service, privacy policies and other remotely hosted content. In 2014, I predicted developers would eventually use WebView across every major app, with some apps built almost entirely inside it. I also warned this would create a security problem because WebView had no protection against dangerous links or malicious code typically found on webpages. Developers could make a WebView look identical to the native app, so people wouldn’t know whether they were using the app itself or interacting with a website. Today, in-app security is a multibillion dollar industry because it’s obvious that opening links inside an app might not be as safe as it should be. Most predictions, especially in the context of digital risk, are not believed by a lot of people. But they become obvious eventually. Today, I’m saying OpenAI’s ChatGPT integration with Apple Messages is more dangerous for some people than almost anything else on the market. Of course someone can take screenshots and send them to the FBI, repeat something they were told, or deliberately share a private conversation. That completely misses the point. None of those things is equivalent to giving an AI service automated access to read, analyse and store entire message histories involving everyone someone communicates with. Comparing deliberate human disclosure with automated access at scale ignores the capability that makes this fundamentally different. And why it removes the main benefit of end to end encryption. I can’t comprehend how security professionals can defend anything that undermines the purpose of end to end encryption by saying "but encryption isn’t broken". Protecting messages while they’re being transmitted means very little if an agent can systematically read, analyse and store them before they’re sent or after they’re received. Apple permissions have legitimate purposes. This particular use of them is the problem. During the early 2000s, I advocated for browser extensions. During the mid to late 2000s, before the first iPhone when mobile web didn't exist, I advocated for mobile web instead of WAP. In 2015, I advocated for chatbot integrations across messaging platforms and business tools. I’m a developer advocate, an open standards advocate, child safety advocate, and privacy advocate. I co-founded 2 W3C initiatives, including the Mobile Web Initiative, where I was tasked with rewriting Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of "One Web". And was a significant contributor to 8 technical specifications, including the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0. I care about humanity. I don’t advocate for one thing in isolation from everything else. I’m a technical expert in specific areas with OSINT skills and 30 years across web, telecom, and mobile. 💡 I consider every stakeholder affected by open standards, technology, and legislation. Sometimes convenience justifies a privacy tradeoff. Sometimes privacy should take priority over security, and sometimes security should take priority over privacy. None of these should be treated as an absolute regardless of the consequences. In 2017, the PKI Consortium asked me to advise them privately and write about the impact DV SSL certificates and HTTPS Everywhere were having on anti phishing security. I faced fierce criticism from privacy advocates who argued that the connection should be encrypted even if the person on the other end was an impersonator. Those were their words. If you care, search for "Insecure Elephant in the Room". The fundamental reasons phishing works were the same when I was impersonated in 1996 when phishing was first discovered on the AOL network, the same when I wrote about it in 2017, and the same today. Now I have to argue with some security professionals defending something that undermines the purpose of end to end encryption. They need to look beyond the mechanics of software and encryption. Technology is an enabler. We need to consider human behaviour, how people will actually use a capability, and what happens when that behaviour occurs at scale. Also, the potential intent that goes beyond a website or privacy statement. I’ve faced this repeatedly over the years. Today, when I argue that government policies and age verification introduced in the name of online child safety and preventing child exploitation are actually surveillance measures, child safety advocates accuse me of not caring about children. This isn’t rocket science. Add AI to everything, even if you’re willing to accept the risks to yourself. But please don’t add AI in ways that undermine another person’s right to privacy or, depending on the context, their personal safety. Some people's lives depend on their ability to rely on end to end encryption. We're not talking about SMS. 💡Criticising the technology used to pursue an objective doesn’t mean opposing the objective.

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  Fred Johnston (@JohnstonFredJ) reported 8 minutes ago

  @getwhatugive @LynAldenContact You’re collapsing the product and the protocol. BlackRock/MSTR make money if demand for bitcoin rises. Demand rises when access gets easier: brokerage accounts, 401ks, treasuries, Lightning, hardware wallets. Shrinking the buyer pool would hurt their bags. That’s the opposite incentive of “reduce access.” Early internet had AOL too. Walled gardens expanded the user base first. The open network still won because the protocol wasn’t owned by AOL.Same here. An ETF is not a modem ban. Anyone can still run a node, hold keys, and send sats. Institutions can offer a wrapper. They cannot revoke the chain. “Gemini agrees” is not an argument. The music-sharing analogy also fails: Napster was illegal and centralized. Bitcoin settles on a public ledger. You don’t sterilize that by listing a ticker.

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  Mark Blaydes (@mblaydes1) reported 9 minutes ago

  @brockpierson I would login to AOL than go make dinner. By the time I came back the home page may have uploaded

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  Daniil (@DaniilBuilds) reported 14 minutes ago

  AOL and Time Warner didn’t just pay for what the two companies were worth in January 2000. They paid for what they believed the two companies could become together. The announced merger was valued at roughly $350B, with AOL shareholders expected to own about 55% of the combined company. The logic was easy to understand: combine AOL’s internet business with Time Warner’s media assets and create value neither could generate alone. But there was a financial problem hiding inside that logic. Future synergies are uncertain. The merger closed in January 2001. SEC disclosures later put the acquisition cost at approximately $147B. Then came the accounting reckoning. In 2002, the combined company reported a $98.7B net loss, including a $54.2B goodwill impairment. That $54.2B was non-cash. It did not mean the company suddenly paid out $54.2B in cash. It meant the value previously assigned to acquired goodwill could no longer be supported at the same level. That distinction matters. When you pay upfront for future synergies, you are effectively putting a price on value that still depends on execution. If the synergies arrive, the premium can make sense. If they don’t, shareholders can end up carrying the cost. The most expensive synergy is the one you pay for before you prove it exists.

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  ⚔️Tina Truth⚔️ (@_tinatruth) reported 14 minutes ago

  AOL had spent years building the perfect internet company for the dial-up era. But the world moved on from it Consumers discovered that broadband was faster, and free to access ...and unlike AOL, it didn’t tie up the telephone lines Suddenly, paying $20/month for AOL's internet access and curated content made less sense when broadband offered a faster, more limitless web. AOL's subscriber base fell from 26.7 million at its peak to roughly 10 million by 2007. This was its second major revenue stream And it was down 62%. How could this company take Time Warner into the future they hoped for?

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  Amazing.AI. (@amazing_AI_) reported 15 minutes ago

  @ThisOldTech2 As a computer user since '94, I'm trying to figure out why I never got a browser in a box. of course, I did access the Web through AOL at the beginning. 🤔