Yahoo CEO 'very sorry' over week-long email outage

[News_Editor]

By James Valles

SUNNYVALE, CALIFORNIA (BNO NEWS) -- Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer took to the internet late Friday to apologize to nearly three million users of its webmail after they were affected by a major hardware outage, representing yet another stumble for Mayer's efforts to revive the faded internet giant.

In a company blog post, Mayer expressed her frustration over the outage that took out storage systems in a data center on Monday and prevented nearly one percent of Yahoo's 280 million users from accessing their Yahoo Mail accounts for days. In some cases, users were also unable to receive messages.

"While our overall uptime is well above 99.9 percent, even accounting for this incident, we really let you down this week," Mayer wrote in the post. "This has been a very frustrating week for our users and we are very sorry."

The glitch, which she described as rare and "more complex" than initially believed, took a large part of the week to fix as engineers worked around the clock, restoring access and messages to inboxes. As of Friday afternoon, Mayer said access had been nearly fully restored and a backlog of messages delivered.

"This process differs for each user and as restoration continues, we're committing to communicating directly with you on progress on an individual basis," Mayer explained.

Furious users of the email service took to social networking sites such as Twitter to vent as the outage continued during the week. One user wrote: "My Yahoo Mail, down 4 days. 4! Yes, I have other email accounts, but they aren't linked to my bill pay and Xmas mail tracking! Quitting ASAP!!!"

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[NeverSure]

It just shows how far Yahoo has fallen. When the WWW first came up, Yahoo led the field. It used to cost money to get listed on their <deleted> search engine!!!! They had an ebay type auction site which was free to use, but somehow ebay knocked them out with a for-fee site.

There is no excuse for a long down time like that. There should be enough redundancy in the system to preclude that. Imagine Google, which is far more complex with far more hits, going down for a week. I've been in Google's "The Dalles, Oregon" server farm and I couldn't believe the backups and redundancy. Then they have that same redundancy all over in many other server farms.

Yahoo mail is just fine and mine didn't go down, but if it had for that long I'd be gone.

[otherstuff1957]

There are some people who haven't been able to access their Yahoo email account for weeks, not days. I've pretty much given up on mine!

[billd766]

I thought it was just me.

I still haven't had an email of apology yet. Perhaps it is still stuck in the system.

[PeterSmiles]

It just shows how far Yahoo has fallen. When the WWW first came up, Yahoo led the field. It used to cost money to get listed on their <deleted> search engine!!!! They had an ebay type auction site which was free to use, but somehow ebay knocked them out with a for-fee site.

There is no excuse for a long down time like that. There should be enough redundancy in the system to preclude that. Imagine Google, which is far more complex with far more hits, going down for a week. I've been in Google's "The Dalles, Oregon" server farm and I couldn't believe the backups and redundancy. Then they have that same redundancy all over in many other server farms.

Yahoo mail is just fine and mine didn't go down, but if it had for that long I'd be gone.

Yahoo is a joke these days, they seem not able to get anything right anymore.

Look at there Finance site, most of the time it isn't loading, and the portfolio's I have on them jump from 70% negative to 25% positive and back to 46% negative in just a matter of seconds.

By the way, none of the figures is correct, and this doesn't just happens once in a while but every day.

Their feedback exist of only negative comments.

[mikemac]

Don't worry about it Yahoo, you did your customers a favor, hopefully they have moved to better email supplier, like Gmail.

I will not use anything remotely associated with Yahoo, absolute crap company.

[Credo]

I like Yahoo's home page. The news stuff is interesting.