14,000 Email Accounts Deleted by Charter

When a recent technical error occurred during what was supposed to be a routine maintenance check, telecommunications provider Charter Communications deleted approximately 14,000 customer email accounts.

Charter says that the company performs scans on a routine basis to establish which email accounts have gone idle for in excess of three months. Regrettably, this time, an unidentified technical blunder occurred that emptied and deleted approximately 1,000 Missouri and another 300 Illinois customer accounts.

Anita Lamont, a company representative, says that Charter will automatically be adding a $50 credit on the next bill of each affected customer on top of a free installation of its home networking for one month.

The company says it is also planning to modify its account deletion policies with the intention that a similar mistake doesn’t happen again in the future and rather than instantly deleting the emails it scans, it will back up the accounts on another server for an undetermined period of time before permanently deleting them.