Massive! Yahoo! Mail! outage! going! on! FOURTH! straight! day!

Yahoo! Mail is only now recovering from a massive outage that has delayed mail delivery and locked some users out of their accounts for the past several days. "We can confirm that 97 per cent of affected users have access to their Mail accounts on web, POP and the Yahoo Mail iOS, Android and Windows 8 apps," the company wrote …

[Fihart]

Yahoo Mail used to work.

Yahoo has been sorely trying the patience of its Mail users recently.

More spam recently than I recall.

Account hijacking incidents.

Forced move to new version (which does have some good new features).

No longer support Opera browser.

New Yahoo Mail seems slow, not helped by ad panels.

Recent outages and very slow spells.

Yahoo now changing to SSL (probably a good thing) but this may inconvenience some users.

Help FAQs on SSL introduction only for Android and iOS -- no mention of WinPhone, Symbian, Blackberry users.

If the above continues to the extent that moving would be less hassle, Yahoo Mail is finished.

[d2]

Re: Yahoo Mail used to work.

@Fihart -Opera still works in yahoo...on par with firefox, which is to say, both are dragging their a_rses in the 'new improved' yahoo...is there any truth to the rumour that m$ contributed to the revamp?

[Whitter]

It's only a matter of time.

The difficulty in moving email address is the only reason Yahoo! still exists.

How long can it carry on?

[Martin Budden]

Re: It's only a matter of time.

If only email addresses were portable in the same way mobile phone numbers are. Something to do with DNS queries?

[John Riddoch]

Re: It's only a matter of time.

"If only email addresses were portable in the same way mobile phone numbers are. Something to do with DNS queries?"

Your own domain name fixes that problem. Get domain name, cheap mail hosting and use GMail's ability to slurp mail via POP3 to get it into GMail. I can now access my mail from mobile, web browser and even IMAP on my desktop.

I used to run my own mail server on a home server, but after issues getting that working on my Qnap NAS, I moved to Gmail, haven't regretted it since. If Gmail started being an issue (e.g. privacy concerns), I can move to another provider quickly without changing email address.

[Charles Manning]

Perhaps yohoo don't realise this

If you're running a web business you need some stickiness to keep your customers(*) in place otherwise they wander off to some other service.

Yahoo mail is pretty much the only sticky service that Yahoo have. Yahoo groups is slightly sticky, but does not engage the customers(*) much so hardly generates any revenue.

So if Yahoo screws up mail badly, to the extent that they motivate customers(*) to move away, then they lose their customers(*) and go down the pipe.

(*) Of course the customers are not really customers. They are the product they sell to advertisers etc.

But hey, let's go tilt that ! a few degrees more and see if that changes anything.

[Shane Lusby]

Re: It's only a matter of time.

Hit it in one. I've been intending to move on from yahoo for probably going on two years now, but thus far the hassle of actually shifting everything has not quite out weighed the general painfulness of yahoo. Ahh, the wonders of being lazy.

[Charles Manning]

This is a symptom, not a problem

If you have a half-hour outage, it is a hardware problem.

If you have a one day outage, you have a problem with the competence of your IT department.

If you have an outage for 4 days, you have a problem with senior management.

The outage is just a symptom of poor management.

Marissa should be spending less time buying party dresses and tilting !s and should rather be running the company.

[pixl97]

Re: This is a symptom, not a problem

It's been going on longer that they are even admitting. Some weeks ago I noticed messages sent to my yahoo account had gone from taking about a minute or two to show up to ever increasing amounts of times. Even worse, if you sent the same message a few times you would get one message almost instantly, one twenty minutes later, and the other just disappeared never to be seen again. Something is very wrong there.

[Pascal Monett]

Re: This is a symptom, not a problem

Brutal assessment, but I can't really disagree with your post.

Not for a company that size.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: This is a symptom, not a problem

C'mon, half an hour? you can't get a desktop hard drive replaced in half an hour. How many hard drives in a server farm, just roughly? how many would you have spares for? what if you have to rebuild the RAID? what if the controller blew up? what if the cable going out of the building melted? these things take time, nothing to do with competence.

Except maybe they should spend something on having backups?

The really poor management in this was thinking they could keep quiet and lie low and NOBODY WOULD NOTICE, instead of truthfully telling people there's a big problem.

[Dan 55]

Yahoo mail's out?

I can't say I noticed.

[Mike Flugennock]

Re: Yahoo mail's out?

...and nothing of value was lost, I presume.

[Nate Amsden]

maybe if they just used cloud

it would work, because cloud fixes everything right?

[Pascal Monett]

Yeah, especially NSA's access to your data.

[Turtle]

Logo.

"Yahoo! Mail is only now recovering from a massive outage that has delayed mail delivery and locked some users out of their accounts for the past several days."

If the users can't get to their email accounts but do get an error page with that really really very wonderful new Yahoo! logo, then they should be okay with that, right?

[Schultz]

Massive Blackout?

I didn't encounter any Blackout, my account was down due to "scheduled maintenance" those last days. I guess they did some very quick scheduling there :).

[sonophy]

Primary Inbox?

So, "... for many of those who use Yahoo! Mail as their primary inbox...", that is so cute.

[Efros]

Yahoo still does mail!

really they do?

[skeptical i]

Yahoogroups is still effed up to unuse-ability,

so yet another snafu with yahoomail is no surprise. Forced migration to "new" formats that don't work, removal of stuff that does, et cetera should have been a red warning flag. As I repeatedly asked the CSR with whom I corresponded /at length/ over the aforementioned fubar'ed yahoogroups, "you clearly have some talented programmers on staff, why are they not being allowed to fix what is broken?"

[Turtle]

@ skeptical i: Re: Yahoogroups is still effed up to unuse-ability,

"As I repeatedly asked the CSR with whom I corresponded /at length/ over the aforementioned fubar'ed yahoogroups, 'you clearly have some talented programmers on staff, why are they not being allowed to fix what is broken?'"

So all the effort that went into breaking it is wasted??

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Yahoogroups is still effed up to unuse-ability,

They don't have any talented programmers on staff any more. The new stack ranking system drove them all away.

[The Morgan Doctrine]

I've been getting spam from my dead friend for three years, thanks to Yahoo! lousy security.

Karma is a bitch, morons!

[T. F. M. Reader]

I had no idea it was so bad...

I confess: I have a Y!Mail account that I've used to register - cowardly - to a couple of websites. I have never used it for anything else, so I may log in once a year or so just to check if the account has been disabled, broken into, or something. I never noticed any blackout, but I logged in just now after reading about it in this item - curiosity, cat, can't recall when I did it last time, etc.

What I saw was dozens of "Your Daily Yahoo Stories" emails in my Inbox. Each seemed to contain a dump of the Y! front page or something similar. Needless to say, I never asked for the "service", nor did I find any way to tell them I didn't want it. When I log in I just want to see if anything important arrived over the last year, so I ended up just filtering the subject into trash - I didn't find any option to just delete the messages outright, either (huh?). Along the way the settings page crashed several times (%$#@!), and the main mail view was so horribly slow and obviously buggy (!@#$%) that I really wonder who is still willing to suffer from it.

Maybe Marissa should really consider a 9 degree turn back? Put the matter straight, so to say?

[RISC OS]

Maybe the delay...

...was caused by NSA servers taking too long to log and scan messages being sent.

[Ken Luskin]

Everything Marissa "the mess" touches turns to CRAP!

EVERYONE who actually uses yahoo.. obviously Wall st people do NOT... KNOWS that it has gone way down hill since miss cutie face took over.

Oh she's so cute.

Oh she can wax on all about this and that.

Oh she can spend gobs of Yahoo cash on numerous little startups.

BUT, yahoo has gone WAY, WAY down hill since miss cutie pie took over.

The stock is up with whole stock market.

The stock is up because of the value of Yahoo's ownership in a Chinese company.

Marissa "the mess" is a terrible manager!

She has done more damage to Yahoo than all the other incompetent CEOs.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Everything Marissa "the mess" touches turns to CRAP!

Some of what you say is very true, although I wouldn't normally call 1.1B on Tumblr really money on a "little startup" :-)

However, she is a product person, and speaking as an insider with 9 years here, she's a lot better at getting good decisions done. She does tend to volunteer herself for unnecessary work and sometimes does dumb things, but things have improved a lot.

I reckon it will take three years to turn around the ship Yahoo. She may not get that long, but I'd put myself down as a cautious optimist. Some of that may be down to my stock options actually being worth something as of the last couple of months, which is a very strange feeling!

[Anonymous Coward]

Speaking as a purple face, I can confirm one thing: the coffee in Sunnyvale is free, and has always been so :-)

[SJG]

I have been using Yahoo Mail for my personal email since soon after it's launch. I use it almost exclusively by IMAP, very occasionally webmail and do use it every day for a least a few emails.

I don't recall ever having experienced or noticed an outage, I'm entirely happy with IMAP, and spam doesn't seem significantly worse than any other mail system. I just checked via email in firefox and all my emails appeared in less than a second.

I kinda feel left out.

[Pascal Monett]

Re: "I kinda feel left out"

That's normal, you're on Yahoo!

(ducks and runs)

[Sheep!]

Simple fix

My pop stopped working a couple of days ago, left it alone all day while I was at work but still borked when I got home. So I went to the pop settings page and discovered Yahoo had changed the port numbers and insisted on SSL for incoming and outgoing. I changed the settings in Outlook to the new settings (yes those settings had been up a long time but hadn't worked for me in the past - the default settings were working just fine) and immediately all was fine again.

[Anonymous Coward]

HDS

This isn't another massive outage caused by their old BlueArc storage is it?

[John Tserkezis]

How about that? I was right.

Someone from Google DID infiltrate Yahoo, instill that new interface that everyone hates, and now the planned mysterious mail outage were all designed to drive users back to Google.

[Piggy52]

Yahool Mail Through Outlook 2007

Ever since the crash my Outlook will not log into the pop Server. They are saying that the pop server is up, it is not or there are other problems. If this continues i will have to go to another Email provider. There excuse to me doesn't hold water. Sorry been with Yahoo since i can remember but i need my email through my Outlook 2007

[roger stillick]

Forth strait day Massive Yahoo Mail outage...continues

Early sat morning started getting actual Emails from last Tuesday Dec 9 only... nothing later...

normal junk mail ads coming just fine...Q= are they running a bulk ad injection system and the actual email platform is down / jammed up 4 days worth of undelivered emails ??

To add to the fun n games, the Brown boys n Old Escargot are not doing packages late this week here..."you weren't home n the Post Ofc wasn't open, so can't deliver your medical stuff"...YUM...dumb= got the computer generated email today from last Tuesday's failure by Brown to perform...

IMHO= Amazon on line is a good idea...Yahoo email n Brown delivery Borks it...this is NOT Bezos's fault...

I blame Microsoft for their alliance w/Yahoo Email...RS.