Yahoo’s Mayer Calls Email Outage ‘Unacceptable’

Yahoo’s Mayer Calls Email Outage ‘Unacceptable’: Mayer, in her blog post, went on to say: “For many of us, Yahoo Mail is a lifeline to our friends, family members and customers. This week, we experienced a major outage that not only interrupted that connection but caused many of you a massive inconvenience—that’s unacceptable and it’s something we’re taking very seriously. Unfortunately, the outage was much more complex than it seemed at first, which is why it’s taking us several days to resolve the compounding issues.”
Customer ire over the outage was stoked early in the process, after some believed Yahoo wasn’t responding with appropriate speed or seriousness. One Yahoo Mail user wrote to eWEEK Monday to say that Yahoo Mail had been down nearly two days and Yahoo hadn’t told users “what the heck is going on.”

Users were also exasperated by a message that wrongly told them that the outage was part of “scheduled maintenance.”

“I don’t recall the last time anything made my blood boil,” Saudi media personality Muna Abu Sulayman Tweeted Dec. 11. “When you are messing with our emails, u r messing w/ our work productivity.”
Mayer, in her post, offered a timeline of events. On Monday evening, Yahoo’s operating center alerted its Mail engineering team that a hardware outage was affecting approximately 1 percent of Yahoo’s users. The team quickly got to work, but the problem “was a particularly rare one, and the resolution for the affected accounts was nuanced since different users were impacted in different ways,” she wrote.
Some users, she continued, saw the “scheduled maintenance” page instead of their accounts, “which was a confusing and incorrect message. … Further, messages sent to those accounts during this time were not delivered but held in a queue.”

As of Friday afternoon, Yahoo was in the process of rolling out IMAP access and restoring the state of users’ inboxes—making certain that emails were in the folders they should be in and starred, if they were supposed to be, etc.