Yahoo users this morning suffered some fairly spectacular outage, leaving them unable to access their Yahoo Mail accounts. This led to many threatening to shut down their accounts or even move to Gmail, an email client operated by Yahoo’s arch-rival Google.
Reports of problems began this morning, as customers took to social media to say they were unable to log-in or read their mail.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with the platform (Millenials!), Yahoo is a tech company now owned by Verizon Media, and it once operated a dominant search engine but found it difficult to compete in the era Google and Facebook.
Despite its apparent decline, Yahoo’s mail service is still used by hundreds of millions of people. Although, Yahoo Mail has still remained a hugely popular platform for free consumer email, with many users staying loyal for up to two decades.
However, Yahoo remains one of the last major free-mail suppliers that still hasn’t added end-to-end encryption to its interface, this is something that Google users will know its security features flag up at every opportunity.
According to Downdetector, a website that provides information on online outages, today’s problems appear to have started sometime around 7 am, where there was a sudden jump in complaints about Yahoo Mail services, especially in the UK and US.
The website had received more than 5,000 reports of problems related to Yahoo Mail and some 300 users also reported problems with other Yahoo services.
According to one Twitter user, Yahoo had been down for “well over 3 hours” in Australia. Most of the complaints originated in Europe.
Customers found that they couldn’t log in properly and instead of their emails, they were greeted with a message reading “We are experiencing some technical details” with an error code of 15.
The problem appeared to only be affecting the mail service, while the rest of the Yahoo portal worked well. Although, this isn’t their first outage being reported, in 2013, a data breach at Yahoo compromised the accounts of the 3 billion users it had at the time.
The reason for the outage remains unclear, but from those who reported issues, 61% said the problem was with the website, while 38% struggled to log-in.
Yahoo acknowledged the fault, telling Tweeps that:
They added:
Roughly an hour later, the company posted another tweet saying that they had identified the issue but could not say how long it would take to resolve it. Thereafter this prompted a fair amount of venom from Twitter users because that’s just how tweeps are!
“What an absolute disaster,” Heather Brandon, a Scotland-based accountant wrote in a tweet to Yahoo.
“I will be switching to Gmail as soon as I can!!!”
“YahooMail is down when I really needed it,’ a Twitter user stated. ‘Guess I’m using Gmail for everything now.”
A spokesperson from Verizon Media representing Yahoo said: “We are aware of a technical issue that is impacting our services.
“We’ve been able to get some services back online already and appreciate our customers’ patience as we work to get everything up and running as soon as possible.”
