Listen to this.
I haven’t had email for a month. Can you believe it? I can’t.
For 30 years, I have depended on email so much I took it for granted.
I have used Rackspace, based in San Antonio, for more than 25 years, virtually since I started WND.
On Dec. 1, I tried to log in – nothing. What the deuce? Did I forget my password? It’s entirely possible having had five strokes in 2019. But, no, it wasn’t that. I asked my wife to check her account. Same thing. She didn’t have access either.
What was going on? There has been a major system disruption on Rackspace’s hosted secure domain – a major hack for 26 days – and there’s no end in sight. It’s a calamity. Unthinkable. No way for people to reach me on my trusty old email address – [email protected].
As an email addict, this is nuts.
In a typical day, I get somewhere near 1,000 emails – or did. It takes me at least two or three hours to process. Apparently, there’s no way to switch email providers now, because my email is hosted by Rackspace and it’s still the designated server. How about everyone else in the company? Well, only Elizabeth and I use Rackspace’s “secure” hosted domain. It was a choice. Everyone else at WND chose to use a Rackspace variant for email, which is unaffected – lucky for them.
The company’s chief product officer, Josh Prewitt, says he’s not sure when it will be back.
“We strongly believe that the vast majority of customers are going to have all access restored to their data,” he added. “And we’re working through that process right now. We’ve already enabled it for a number of customers.”
It just takes time.
“But that process is well underway,” he said. “We’re scaling it up at this point, we already enabled it for tons of our customers, and it’s going to continue to accelerate and scale quickly over the next few days and week.”
But it’s been a month – already.
I can still use several alternatives – but can’t receive email sent to my longtime WND address.
So for those thinking I’m ignoring them, I wanted to say I’m definitely NOT. I just can’t get WND email. It breaks my heart because I depend on it so much.
And that brings up another thing.
Although I am among millions of customers currently without email, it reminds me how much we have become so DEPENDENT on it. It has become such a big part of our life – even a necessity for routine things like paying bills and routine communications. When it works, it’s a blessing. When it fails, as it has this month, it becomes a curse.
Welcome to the world of technology.
Technology has been like that – a blessing and a curse.
Twenty-five years ago, when I started WND as the first independent news site on the internet, I thought it was the sure-fire cure for media bias. But 20 years later, I realized the internet was had become a THREAT to freedom of the press. That’s what Google, Facebook, YouTube, Microsoft, Amazon, etc., proved to be – just as Twitter was exposed to be. Google and YouTube, for instance, recently demonitized WND – permanently. Why? Because we were skeptical about the results of the 2020 election and the COVID vaccine. Were we proved right? Yes. But it didn’t matter.
Right now, even email has proven a minor curse to me.
After a month, I truly wonder if I should ever expect to see those 30,000 emails that haven’t been transmitted. If I do, it will be a chore, indeed, to find the time to deal with them. Can you imagine? It reminds me of Hillary Clinton’s “missing” 30,000 emails.
These are some of the trials of modern-day life.
I don’t know how it will work out.
I am praying it does – an activity that’s always a good thing. But I don’t know.
I’ll be sure to keep you updated on my email woes. PLEASE DON’T WRITE TO ME, in the meantime.
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This article was originally published by the WND News Center.
