After a week full of issues with Yahoo Mail, the company's CEO makes a formal apology

Dec 14, 2013 10:42 GMT  ·  By

It’s been a long week for Yahoo Mail users and for Yahoo itself. Marissa Mayer, the company’s CEO, took to the company’s blog to apologize for the inconvenience.

“This has been a very frustrating week for our users and we are very sorry,” Mayer’s message starts off.

Apparently, Yahoo experienced a major outage that not only interrupted Yahoo Mail, but also caused massive inconveniences to the company’s users. It looks like the situation was more complex than originally thought, which is why it took so long to fix.

According to Mayer, the hardware that suffered the outage served some 1 percent of all users.

“However, the problem was a particularly rare one, and the resolution for the affected accounts was nuanced since different users were impacted in different ways. Some of the affected users were unable to access their accounts, instead seeing an outdated ‘scheduled maintenance’ page which was a confusing and incorrect message (this has since been corrected and updated).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 writes.

The company says they’ve now restored access to “almost everyone” and delivered the backlog of messages. IMAP access will continue to be rolled out over the next few days, while they’re also working on restoring full inbox state.

“While our overall uptime is well above 99.99%, even accounting for this incident, we really let you down this week. We can, and we will, do better in the future,” Mayer wrote.

For those of you who do not know, Yahoo Mail has been down for a lot of users starting on Monday. The issue was supposed to be fixed by Wednesday, as the company first acknowledge the issues, but things had only partially been fixed by then. The problems continued on until Friday and even now some users still do not have access to their email accounts.

Many of them, Yahoo Mail users for over a decade, have decided to quit using the service and to create accounts elsewhere after this week’s fiasco.