Yahoo services, including email, went down on Thursday, September 5, causing outrage from its customers.
According to Downdetector, a website providing information on online outages, they received over 5,000 reports on Yahoo Mail problems by 2 a.m. ET and hundreds of reports on other Yahoo services.
For a time, even help.yahoo.com, the company’s customer service webpage, was not accessible to users, displaying the message “Thank you for your patience. Our engineers are working quickly to resolve the issue."
At 2:40 a.m. ET, Yahoo Customer Care announced on Twitter “You may not be able to access some of our services, including email. Our top priority right now is getting this fixed. We appreciate your patience." Yahoo users expressed their frustration by replying to the message.
One user replied “’Some of our service'? Your entire network is down. You are losing your customers [sic] money...including me. Unbelievable." Another tweeted "While you're at it, how about an explanation for your system going down. What happened?"
While Yahoo continued to update customers on the outage, the company offered no clear explanation about what happened. By 9:30 a.m., Yahoo declared "Most services are back online. This is a technical issue that affected our services."
Most of the complaints were from Europe, particularly from the United Kingdom, but someone from Australia also tweeted about the outage. According to users. They seem to have lost emails that were sent when the system stopped
Yahoo parent company Oath, a subsidiary of Verizon, failed to give an explanation for the outage and only stated that it was "aware of a technical issue" affecting its services.
In 2013, Yahoo was hit by a data breach, compromising the accounts of around 3 billion people that subscribed to its services at the time.
