UPDATE: SUNDAY, JULY 17, 7:30 A.M.: Some Optimum Online customers who still had no webmail access on Saturday say they called Cablevision and had their passwords reset. They are now receiving E-mails.

Cablevision announced Friday afternoon that it’s Optimum Online Webmail service has been restored after being down for more than 24 hours. But, as of Saturday, many in Nassau and Suffolk Counties say they are still without service, and still haven’t received all of their backed up E-mails. It has now been more than 48 hours the service has been down.

“The email disruption has been resolved,” says Sarah Chaikin, Director of Media Relations for Cablevision. “The issue was caused by a digital mail storage device malfunction.  We believe that this was an extremely rare, one-time problem after more than a decade of uninterrupted email service and that no customer email was lost. We apologize to our customers and thank them for their patience.”

Cablevision says that no customer Internet access was affected, nor were any non-Cablevision email services (such as Yahoo and Gmail), and that the interruption “impacted a minority of customers throughout the Cablevision service area.”

“The utmost care was taken to restore service as quickly as possible while ensuring that no emails were lost, says Chaikin.

Customers across Long Island, New York State, New Jersey, Connecticut and Pennsylvania who tried to log on to their E-mail  between Thursday morning and Friday afternoon were getting a prompt asking for their password. After the password was entered, an error message read, “Secure Connection Failed.”