Yahoo! Mail Suffers Unexpected Outage

At around noontime today, information hub Yahoo! suffered a new embarrassment as their popular email server appears to have incurred a technical glitch.

Early on in the issue, customers were permitted to log into the Yahoo! Mail server but was blocked from reviewing or writing emails. For members using older Yahoo! Mail, an error message appeared. For newer accounts, a pop-up introduced that a set of enhanced features were being added to Yahoo! Mail and required the user to agree to term. Regardless of the choice, the pop-up banner would not disappear. The second stage of the Yahoo! Mail issue became a full scale outage where users were unable to even log into their accounts. The email service would return just ahead of 2pm hour but there appears to be lingering problems receiving emails messages.

Much has been made of the struggles of Yahoo! in recent years as the one-time tech darling has fallen well behind the integration of social media. Earlier this month, Yahoo! experienced a PR setback as the company admitted to losing almost half a million email addresses and password to hackers. Though Yahoo! is one of the latest companies to endure a technical flaw, the world is quite aware that this is no the only high-profile incident that interfered with mass electronic communications on the Internet. Recently, social networking site Twitter had been affected by two massive outages.

It is uncertain if all or some of the reported 290.3 million users of Yahoo! Mail are affected at this issue. Other reports by CNET and the CBS News website indicates it is only a problem attached to some accounts. Yahoo! is aware of the issues and are currently involved in restoring the Yahoo! Mail service to full operations.