Yahoo Mail outage angers customers, service restored for most users

Web services do go down once in a while but services are often fixed and restored in no time. Unfortunately, for a number of Yahoo Mail users, the downtime for their email service took longer than normal and caused inconvenience for those relying on their email to send and receive messages.

On Monday night, a number of Yahoo Mail users lost access to their email. Some reported seeing messages for a "scheduled maintenance". Yahoo acknowledged the outage on Twitter and said that a fix would arrive by 1:30 PM PT.

The company also advised users experiencing the outage to access their email via tablet or smartphone instead. Two days later, however, some users still complain that the issues have not been fixed yet. "Yahoo Mail has been down for 48 hrs. Literally unable to even check your inbox period," shared one unhappy customer on Twitter.

Yahoo SVP of Communications Products Jeff Bonforte posted an apology on Yahoo's official blog and explained that the outage is caused by a problem in one of Yahoo's mail data centers. "The issue has been harder to fix than we originally expected," he said. "We have dozens of people working around the clock to bring it to a resolution."

Yahoo's lackluster updates, however, have exacerbated the situation. Yahoo may be a free webmail service and most users use it for personal emails but accessing their Yahoo Mail can be critical for some users. Yahoo customers expressed their disappointment on the prolonged downtime and the consequential damage of the email hiatus on Twitter. It isn't clear, however, how many users have been affected by the outage because this can be difficult to gauge.

Yahoo's latest update on the mail status was posted on Tuesday at 5:00 PM PST. It says that most users should already be able to send and receive messages via web and Yahoo apps and that efforts are still made to restore access for all affected users. It also advised that it may take a while for the messages that were sent during the outage to appear in users' inbox. The update also says that the company is still working on restoring IMAP and POP access for those accessing their email using non-Yahoo apps.

The most recent update, as of reporting, is this -