America Online Goes Offline--Again

America Online went offline again for about 45 minutes for some subscribers Wednesday as a technical snafu kept customers from connecting with the world’s largest subscriber-based computer network.

Subscribers weren’t able to dial into the service between about 3 and 3:45 p.m. Pacific time, the company said. Customers who were already online using the service weren’t affected. America Online said it could not determine how many of its more than 6 million customers had been unable to use the service.

An AOL service technician confirmed earlier Wednesday that some customers had been experiencing problems retrieving and sending e-mail. The technician declined to provide details.

It was the second time in seven weeks that a service problem has hit the company. As with the first outage, which took place Aug. 7, the second downtime was caused by scheduled systems and operations maintenance. That had been scheduled for early Wednesday morning.

The Aug. 7 outage cut service to all America Online’s subscribers for almost 19 hours. They were unable to retrieve e-mail or get access to the Internet through the service.

America Online said it was not sure why customers had problems dialing into the service only after 6 p.m.

During the outage, customers were able to call into America Online’s host computer. However, when they tried to sign on, the computer would freeze with the message “Checking password.”