Yahoo! Mail users see crying baby who says firm is 'over capacity'

It's a bad Monday morning for the server managers at Yahoo! after the firm's Mail service took a dive at around 11am Pacific Time (7pm UTC). Yahoo! crying baby Users aren't crying, they're fuming Visitors to the site have been getting a ClipArt-style graphic of a crying baby with the message "Sorry, we are over capacity. …

[Charles Manning]

Fool me once...

"Fool me once, shame on you.

Fool me twice, no three, no four times... shame on me!"

When you logged in to reset your password you should have just closed down your account (or at least set up a redirect).

[Anonymous Coward]

who?

yahoo are still on the web? what the fuck! 1996 called it wants it's dinosaur back

[Mike Flugennock]

Re: who?

"...1996 called it wants it's dinosaur back."

Yeah, its big purple dinosaur.

It loves you, you love it.

[Sandra Greer]

Longtime user

Yahoo Mail has actually been good for many years. Their Spam Filter was way ahead of everyone else's. Lately, though, the server has been down about once a week, and today it was redirecting to edit.yahoo.com, which isn't anywhere. It has also been really slow. Like never opening a folder, sometimes forgetting to open an email. I have not seen the crying baby, though.

Worth every cent I have paid for it, must say.

I have moved the heavy stuff to GMail, and am leaving the political requests for money, cartoons, etc on Yahoo.

[Qassam ElShawarma]

Wait, people still use Yahoo! Mail?

Really? Why?

[Mark 85]

Re: Wait, people still use Yahoo! Mail?

How about it's free to the user if you ignore the ads? Gives people a choice for a nice throwaway account then dealing with certain online companies who like to ignore the opt-out option and send spam anyway. For the price, it's a great value even if it crashes.

[easyk]

Re: Wait, people still use Yahoo! Mail?

better question is why not? It does the job does it not? not everyone is so driven to be fashionable.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Wait, people still use Yahoo! Mail?

Because it's not Google or Microsoft?

[sisk]

Re: Wait, people still use Yahoo! Mail?

Really? Why?

I give my yahoo address (which I've had for 15 years now) to places I know or suspect will be selling my email address to spammers. It only gets about 500 emails a day last time I checked.

[Anonymous Coward]

Downdetector down...

"Well, this is awkward...

We are having some server issues, try again in a minute or so.

ಠ_ಠ"

Too many complaints about Yahoo?

[PunkTiger]

I must be one of the lucky ones, then. I have yet to experience any problems or anomalies in using Yahoo! Mail. I've had the account since the late 1990s, and I still use it every day. Go, as they say, fig.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had mine about the same time and it's getting worse. I din't get the crying baby, I just got to the sign up page with no option to login, when you try to login, it just sent you to a sign up page.

No doubt it going to be due to another round of "improvements"

[admiraljkb]

That's it, I'm going to ARCH! :)

[Arachnoid]

Maybe if

They had fed the baby that morning the issue would have never got so bad

[Anonymous Coward]

A "particularly rare" problem ?

I wouldn't call incompetence particularly rare...

[PG2255]

Don't worry. As soon as a few more people leave, the chance of it going over capacity will reduce!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

What! has! happened! to! overused! exclamation! points! in! title!

See! title!

[Anonymous Coward]

[e-mail] ?

[e-mail] ?

If you have an email on sky.com then you are probably stuffed also as Sky seems to use Yahoo for it's mail service.

I could be wrong but a recent email seems to indicate it does.

e.g.

Received: from [213.105.99.178] by web172306.mail.ir2.yahoo.com via HTTP; Thu, 06 Feb 2014 10:58:43 GMT

X-Rocket-MIMEInfo: Blah Blah Blah

X-Mailer: YahooMailWebService/0.8.175.631

From: [userid_removed]@sky.com

I suggest using the IMAP protocol on a decent email program and avoiding all the weberver capacity issues, not to mention not having to read all those dratted Adverts - works well for Gmail personal users too, Google is picky over anyone sending large numbers of emails via IMAP / POP3 .

[John Savard]

And here I thought the crying baby picture meant their site was hacked.

[Captain Scarlet]

Maybe crying babies are smarter than we realise, they may have cracked the website and placed their favourite image up.

[Grease Monkey]

Why?

One answer to the question why? is that plenty of people get Yahoo! mail through their ISP.

On that note however once all the BT mail accounts migrate away from Yahoo! there'll be lots of spare capacity.

Another answer is of course that a lot of people have been using Yahoo! mail since forever and sensible people don't change their email address every month.

[red floyd]

Yahoo totally sucks...

Their "two factor" thing sucks. My mother had forgotten her password, so we went through their hoops. Sure enough, they sent a authentication text to her mobile phone. So far, so good.

BUT.... When she entered a new password, she was told that her password wasn't strong enough, even though it met every single criterion they had specified. She was trying to enter a 14 character password with upper case, lower case, numeric, and special characters. Yahoo! insisted it wasn't strong enough.

THEN, I tried to use their "email support" form. I filled out all the info, and hit submit, only to be told I hadn't entered my first name onto the form. Slight problem -- there WAS no place on the form to enter my first name.

Yahoo totally bites.