AOL home pages hit by glitch

America Online confirmed Wednesday that a "hardware error" caused a "small amount" of people to lose personal home pages hosted on the Internet giant's servers. Those affected were people using AOL Hometown, a free service that lets them publish and design personal Web pages. Hometown users began noticing the effects of the glitch last week when they tried accessing their file transfer protocol (FTP) pages and found nothing. FTP is a popular means of publishing content on the Web. This not the first time in recent memory that technical problems left some Hometown users brooding in the dark. In February, a routine server upgrade caused problems for people accessing and uploading files onto Hometown pages. AOL spokesman Nicholas Graham denied any connection between the latest issue and the previous server upgrade problems. --Jim Hu, Special to ZDNet News