Updated. Yahoo Mail seems to be down for a sizable chunk of users. A spokesman for the company confirmed the outage, saying, “Yahoo! Mail is currently inaccessible to some users. We are working to correct the issue and restore all functionality immediately. We know that this may have caused some inconvenience and we apologize to our users who might be affected.”
The outage is yet another black mark against the company, which has been struggling with setbacks for some time now. Insiders have reportedly been whispering for months about how the shine has started to wear off of Yahoo’s tough talking CEO Carol Bartz. Bartz joined the company to much fanfare in January 2009 but has since overseen layoffs, revenue declines, and a top-level executive brain drain. The company has also been shutting down or spinning off a number of properties, the most recent being the divestiture this week of social-bookmarking pioneer Delicious.
Update: According to a source with knowledge of the situation, less than .5 percent of all Yahoo Mail accounts are affected by the outage. If true, that accounts for some 1.3 million users, according to Yahoo’s most recent user stats.
And to be fair, Yahoo isn’t the only web giant that’s encountered email access problems. Gmail has had several notable blackouts. Some of Gmail’s glitches reportedly wiped out all the information in some users’ accounts (the information was later restored). Perhaps this would be a good time to revisit Simon Mackie’s excellent post earlier this year on how to back up your email accounts.
Is Yahoo Mail working for you? Let us know in the comments.
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