AOL technical glitch causes wrong information

August 26, 2004

People who tried to access their personal pages on America Online last weekend found themselves looking at a completely different page instead, AOL confirmed Monday.

The glitch affected MyAOL personalization features such as stock portfolios, calendars, sports scores and weather updates for a "very small number of users," the company said. AOL did not reveal what caused the problem but said its effects were still under investigation.

For now, most of the users affected are getting their old pages as a stopgap, while AOL fixes its software.

"We took immediate, corrective steps to address the issue," AOL spokesman Nicholas Graham said. "We've already reverted to a previous version of the software that rendered this customized content, so no new users have been affected that we are aware of."

Graham declined to confirm or deny a report last week by Computerworld that said the MyAOL members affected could pull up other members' personalized Web pages. The glitch involved customized pages on both AOL's proprietary service, which has 24 million subscribers, and the AOL.com Web page.

The personalization glitch comes a couple of weeks after a vulnerability was discovered on AOL Instant Messenger. The issue could have allowed malicious attackers run a "buffer overflow" through a security hole in AIM's software. AOL patched the hole by releasing an updated version of AIM.

Source: C-Net News

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