AOL openID provider down
October 21st, 2008 by Mickey Panayiotakis
OpenID
21 October 2008
As of 1400 EDT, AOL’s openID provider, openid.aol.com, is down.
For better or worse, I use openID. For worse or better, I use aol.com. The reason is simple: When I started checking out openID, AOL had an openID provider that gave every AIM account an openID account. (If you have an AIM account your openID URL is http://openid.aol.com/aimusername ).
Things have been peachy. I have a single way to log in to many places, including all the 37Signals products, many blogs, Wikis, etc.
Except for today. It seems my openID provider is down, as is presumably every other AOL openid account. DNS does not resolve. Which means now I can’t log into any of these sites.
Well, that’s not entirely true. I could bypass openID, wait for my non-openID account pasword to get emailed to me, etc. But the bottom line is I can’t log in.
This brings up some questions about relying on openID. Admittedly, I’ve not had an issue with this so far. However, it may be nice to have some work-around. For now I’ll wait and see. More as this develops.
Impact
In pure numbers, this potentially affects the more than 63 million AIM users, assuming they all use openID. If only 10% use this feature, that’s still over 6 million users. The frustrating thing here is that there is no “status” page or other way to find out the current status of the provider.