Yahoo on Wednesday finally fully acknowledged on Twitter and on the service’s personal blog that its Yahoo Mail service is experiencing issues which some of its customers had to face for more than two weeks, ZDNet reports. According to the company, an unknown number of users were not able to send and receive emails since November 25. Similar problems for other Yahoo Mail customers started on Monday, although the company only briefly mentioned these issues via Twitter a day later. “We know some of our users are unable to use Yahoo Mail,” the Yahoo Mail team wrote on December 10. “We’re on it and trying to restore access in a few hours. Sorry for the inconvenience.”
However, the service issue continued well into Wednesday, and some users may still have issues getting their email. The company kept releasing short updates via Twitter yesterday, before publishing an equally short but “important update” on Tumblr. According to the message authored by Yahoo’s senior vice president of communication products Jeffrey Bonforte, a hardware problem affected the company’s mail data centers, being “harder to fix than […] originally expected.” Despite labeling the message as “important,” Yahoo did not actually explain what caused the issue, trying only to reassure customers that dozens of engineers are working on the problems.
Yahoo then continued to push updates on its Twitter account, with recent messages saying that some of its Yahoo Mail customers may have already received some of their missing emails, although not all issues were solved. “The affected servers have been up and running for over 6 hours.” Yahoo said on Twitter a few hours ago. “30% of messages sent during the outage have now been delivered.” The company is apparently working through the night to restore access to users that are still locked out of email.
Yahoo Mail – which in October has received a makeover, the second one in less than a year – has received plenty of criticism from existing users recently, although Yahoo did not bring back some of the features they were asking for. Internally, the company has acknowledged the negative feedback, AllThingsD writes. But management seemed to be overly confident that users won’t actually ditch the service, despite the unwelcomed user interface changes. The same Bonforte said during a November 8 staff meeting that Yahoo would have to “kick the users hard” in a certain body part to make them leave Yahoo Mail.
