A Fox News host with five million followers on X spent an entire day trying to get AOL to let him back into his inbox, and then told every one of them about it.
Mark Levin, 69, a lawyer, radio host and Trump appointee to the Homeland Security Advisory Council, posted his complaint about the locked account on Tuesday, Nov. 10, 2026. By Wednesday, Nov. 11, the post had collected more than 2.3 million views and a pile-on from critics on the left and the right.
“Folks, I have spent literally the entire day trying to get someone at AOL to unlock my email,” Levin wrote. He said that for eight hours he had been promised a call back from supervisors that never came.
Being among the last people on the planet still loyal to AOL, he argued, should have earned him better treatment. It had not, so he vowed to leave the service once the problem was fixed, adding that he had only stayed this long because it was convenient.
First Came the Buddy List Jokes
The sharpest early jabs came from his own side. Daily Wire commentator Matt Walsh joked about a bad dial-up connection, asked whether someone had been tying up the landline, and suggested Levin check with anyone on his Buddy List.
From there the replies turned into a yard sale of 1990s technology. Writer Charlotte Clymer floated a browser problem and asked when he had last updated Netscape. Economist Robert P. Murphy wanted to know whether he had tried a fax. Former West Virginia state delegate Derrick Evans asked for Levin’s ICQ number and offered to introduce him to a new website called Napster, then posted that he himself had been marked safe from being locked out of AOL. Political journalist Marc Caputo said the post needed random SpongeBob capitalization before he could read it as satire. Conservative commentator Jeremy Carl shared it as the platonic ideal of a boomer tweet, and Amber Duke asked whether it was the most boomer post in history.
Mace Turns the Joke Toward Iran
Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., aimed at Levin’s politics instead of his software. “The last man on Earth still using AOL is also the last man still arguing for endless Middle East wars,” Mace wrote. Levin, who follows exactly one account on X — President Donald Trump’s — answered that Mace would soon be off the public dole and hunting for a private sector job she was not qualified for, and asked her to let everyone know where she landed.
Former Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., kept it shorter. “Your AOL email address was promised to someone else 3,000 years ago,” Gaetz posted.
Levin’s critics on the left reached for the same connection. Jeet Heer of The Nation called him one of the top five people Trump listened to in deciding to go to war with Iran. Journalist Mehdi Hasan said he could not decide whether to laugh at the ridiculousness of the man or cry that someone so ridiculous had helped the president start a Middle East war that he said killed 120 children on its first day. Drop Site News co-founder Ryan Grim said he could not accept that the post was genuine. Journalist Yashar Ali made a narrower point: a man who speaks constantly with people of enormous power was airing his customer-service problems in public. Longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone did not join the mockery, replying that the situation was crazy.
Every Email Since the 1980s
Levin had promised to take the matter up on his nationally syndicated radio show, which airs at 6 p.m., and he did. He told listeners he was not stuck with AOL so much as stuck with his archive, because his correspondence going back to the 1980s lives in that account. Switching is a nuisance, he said, but they would do it once he had access again.
He then walked through the day. His team entered every security number and answered every question the company asked, he said, only to be blocked again; a phone call ended with him being hung up on twice before someone told him the matter had to go to a supervisor. He said he had handed over everything he had and could not understand why no one would simply unlock the account.
Not the Last Man After All
Levin’s claim to be among the last humans on AOL does not hold up. The company, owned by Bending Spoons, says it still draws around 30 million monthly users, that three million people check their AOL email every day, and that it ranks as a top 10 email provider worldwide with more than 40 years of keeping people connected.
The competition is another matter. In a 2026 SellCell breakdown of free email providers, Gmail leads with an estimated 1.8 billion users worldwide, followed by Apple’s iCloud Mail at around 950 million, Microsoft Outlook at roughly 400 million and Yahoo Mail at an estimated 225 million. AOL accounted for just 0.7% of the providers analyzed. The service once peaked at more than 35 million dial-up subscribers; AOL Instant Messenger shut down in 2017 with about 500,000 users left, and the dial-up business was discontinued on Sept. 30, 2025.
The email saga landed on a man already under fire from his own coalition. Levin, a neoconservative former Reagan administration staffer, has been a staunch supporter of the Iran war, a stance that has split MAGA’s “America First” isolationists from its war hawks. Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly have argued his position damages the country, and British broadcaster Piers Morgan, after a public feud, grouped him with the worst sort of permanently enraged war-mongering imbeciles. Trump has boosted him on social media as a great American patriot. On Wednesday, Nov. 11, Levin said he and his wife had been warned by a federal agency that they might be targeted by an Iranian cyberattack. “Well, that appears to have occurred,” he wrote, without saying whether it was connected to the lockout. For now, Levin says he is leaving AOL as soon as AOL lets him back in.