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Yahoo Mail users across the world were unable to access their emails for several hours yesterday following the temporary crash of the site.
The incident drew the ire of thousands of users, who had no clue of how long the outage was lasting.
Downdetector, a website that provides information on online outages, had received more than 5,000 reports related to Yahoo Mail by 2:00.a.m. Some 300 users also reported challenges with other Yahoo services.
Yahoo, through its Twitter handle, @YahooCare, said: “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.
“We understand how difficult this must be for you. We are working especially hard to fix this. Please stay tuned for updates.”
Some hours later, the organisation posted another tweet to say it had identified the issue but could not say how long its resolution would take.
According to a Twitter user, “Yahoo had been down for well over three hours in Australia.” Most of the complaints originated in Europe.
In Nigeria, the service was inaccessible for about six hours, with several complaints from users.
Yahoo’s customer service webpage – help.yahoo.com – also crashed for a while, displaying the message, “Thank you for your patience. Our engineers are working quickly to resolve the issue.”
In 2013, a data breach at Yahoo compromised the accounts of the three billion users it had at the time.
The parent company Oath, a subsidiary of Verizon (VZ), could not immediately be reached for comments on the cause of yesterday’s outage.
As at press time, the firm had posted another update, saying: “Most services are back online. This is a technical issue that affected our services. We are sorry for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience as we get everything back up and running.