Since assuming the top position at Yahoo 18 months ago, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer was able to convince the world that the company is still relevant today. She pushed the right buttons in implementing changes in the company to increase productivity of employees, acquired companies, and bought and shutdown competitions hindering it from achieving its goals. However, Mayer might be having her worst nightmare yet with the multi-day outage of the Yahoo Mail.
The web mail service of Yahoo has been having problems since Monday and Yahoo has not been able to fully restore it, as of reporting.
"By now, most of the affected Yahoo Mail users should have access to their accounts on the web, POP and through our mobile apps for iOS, Android and Windows 8. There are a small number of users whose accounts have been brought online within the last several hours who may temporarily not see messages from before the outage. We're working hard to fully restore these inboxes. In the meantime, these users should be receiving the backlog of emails sent during the outage and should be able to send and receive new messages," an update on Yahoo help read. "IMAP access is not yet widely available and we are actively working to restore access."
While most users have access to their inboxes restored, the damage has been done. Small businesses missed orders, job seekers failed to see schedules for their interviews, or worried parents not able to check the emails from their children serving the army in another corner of the globe. Users were outraged. According to the company, a hardware problem at one mail data center caused the outage and this surely must have left Mayer flustered.
On Wednesday, the Yahoo CEO personally apologized to users. "An Important Update for Our Users - yahoomail: We are very sorry for recent difficulties with Yahoo Mail," Mayer posted on her Twitter account.
An Important Update for Our Users - yahoomail: We are very sorry for recent difficulties with Yahoo Mail.... https://t.co/NR1eWazrAp
— marissamayer (@marissamayer) December 11, 2013
The users were also not pleased with how Yahoo took care of the complaints coming from all directions in the Internet. Kara Swisher of tech blog AllThingsD accurately described the what has been happening and the current situation.
"What is consistent are two things: Outages have been occurring regularly and Yahoo has been woefully negligent in informing its users about the problems. They have also declined to return emails inquiring about the issue and others related to Yahoo Mail from this site for weeks, in perhaps the most astonishing display of PR incompetence I have experienced in a very long time," Swisher wrote.
Yahoo first relied on Twitter to update users, after failing to answer phone calls and emails until the situation turned into a full-crisis and a PR nightmare. It took Yahoo a day or two to realize that people are not pleased with what they are doing before it began releasing frequent updates about the downtime.
Since Mayer took the helm at Yahoo, the company has been giving the free web mail service "gorgeous" makeovers that loyal users do not find appealing.
The real damage might not be obvious for Yahoo now but it might be safe to assume that some of the 200 million users of Yahoo Mail will start looking at the alternatives.
