3-day Cox email outage leaves customers in Oklahoma and 13 other states frustrated

Meanwhile, information technology, or IT, experts on Monday blogged about avoiding future problems and speculated on the cause of Cox's problems.

Virginia Paige, a tweeter on Twitter.com @VirginiaMinute, recommended users get a hosted email solution such as Gmail, which is independent of their Internet service providers, or ISP, so if they change their ISP, they don't have to change their email address.

“That's not to say that those services don't ever go down … but even if the Internet is out … I can still get to my email, and I can send emails from there using one of my many email addresses,” Paige blogged. “If Gmail goes down, I still have an old Yahoo address that I can use.”

Daniel Holm of InterWorks IT firm speculated Cox's problem involved an untested continuity plan. “Either their unit data was unreadable or they rebuilt their alternate hardware,” Holm said.

Brad Thomas, vice president of technology for Perimeter Technology Center, said Cox's issues could range from software problems on their platform to domain name system problems to infrastructure problems with service, storage or network devices.

Jay Wade, chief executive of Red Earth Systems, said it behooves Cox not to share too much information.

“It would be a security risk to show what went wrong in their design system, sort of like showing the secret sauce and how to break the system,” Wade said.

“It's hard to guarantee you'll be up 100 percent of the time,” Wade said. “We try to keep the computers running, and we're successful most of the time. But unfortunately, like Cox and everybody else in the game, it's not always easy.”