MARISSA MAYER: 'We Are Very Sorry' For Yahoo Mail's Big Outage This Week
In a post on her Tumblr page, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer apologized for the outage, but said it only affected about 1% of Yahoo Mail users. She also explained exactly what caused the problem.
"This has been a very frustrating week for our users and we are very sorry," Mayer wrote.
Mayer said the problem started Monday night with a hardware outage with one of Yahoo Mail's servers. That server powered email for about 1% of Yahoo Mail users. But it took Yahoo several days to fix the problem because the outage affected users differently.
Here's how Mayer explained it:
Some of the affected users were unable to access their accounts, instead seeing an outdated "scheduled maintenance" page which was a confusing and incorrect message (this has since been corrected and updated). Further, messages sent to those accounts during this time were not delivered, but held in a queue.
Mayer said most Yahoo Mail users should have access to their accounts now. However, it may take some more time for mail folders to sync again.
Her apology caps a week of bad PR for Yahoo. For example, AllThingsD's Kara Swisher blasted Yahoo on Wednesday for not providing users with enough information on why Yahoo Mail was down and when it was going to be fixed. There were also numerous complaints on social media sites like Twitter from Yahoo Mail users. Several frustrated users reached out to media, including Business Insider, to complain.