‘Hardware problem’ causes partial outage for Yahoo Mail

On the 9^th  of December 2013 a lot of Yahoo Mail users started complaining about issues when trying to access the service. Soon after that, the company confirmed that one of its Mail servers was acting up, and that the issue had proved to be much harder to fix than anticipated. Yahoo assured users that it had teams working on it round the clock to bring everything back up. The Mail issues seem to have been taken care, and with all that done and dusted, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer took to the company’s official blog to apologize for the prolonged outage.

She also detailed exactly what had happened. Mayer writes that there was a specific hardware outage in one of Yahoo’s storage systems that serves 1 percent of its users, but the “problem was a particularly rare one.” Since different users were affected in different ways, the resolution for affected accounts was nuanced. However during the week, Yahoo’s team worked “around the clock” to restore access as well as all messages to Mail inboxes. IMAP access was also improved for users who use clients such as Apple Mail or Outlook to access Yahoo Mail. Since then, Mayer says, access has been restored to “almost everyone” and the backlog of messages has been delivered.

Resources:

http://www.ubergizmo.com/2013/12/yahoo-ceo-marissa-mayer-apologizes-for-mail-outage/

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10811_3-57615298/hardware-problem-causes-partial-outage-for-yahoo-mail/