Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer apologized Friday night for an extended outage that affected some Yahoo Mail users this week. Calling the problem more complex than it first appeared, Mayer said she was "very sorry," but that the company had restored the inboxes of almost all of its users.
Mayer wrote on Yahoo's Tumblr page that the problem was first noticed at 10:27 p.m. on Monday, Dec. 9 when Yahoo Mail experienced a hardware outage that affected 1% of its users. Without going into detail, Mayer said the problem was "nuanced," affecting different users in different ways, so it wasn't an easy fix.
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When many users couldn't access their inboxes, many of them saw an alert that said the service was down for scheduled maintenance, which was untrue. Mayer said Yahoo has corrected this erroneous message.
It took Yahoo the remainder of the week to fully fix the problem, restoring IMAP access to accounts so users who access Yahoo Mail through another client (such as Microsoft Outlook or Apple Mail) could reach their inboxes again.
Mayer was particularly contrite in her apology, acknowledging that the outage has been frustrating for Yahoo Mail users and that "we really let you down this week." She promised the company was working to prevent similar outages in the future.
It hasn't been a good week for Yahoo services. In addition to the Mail outage, Flickr went down for two hours on Thursday.
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