Yahoo! Mail Outage Supposedly Caused by Server Upgrade

Despite the fact that there are numerous webmail services that probably provide more reliability and features than it, Yahoo! Mail is still among the most popular services used worldwide, and this became obvious when people all over the Globe reacted when they could not access their emails.

About a million persons were not able to login to their Yahoo! Mail accounts on Thursday, 28th of April, 2011, and they complained on every media they had at reach.

Posting tweets, status updates or downright reproachful posts on their personal blogs, everyone wanted to know the cause of the outage as well as a sign that it is getting fixed.

In the meantime, the problem has been resolved and everybody can finally read and send email via their Yahoo! accounts.

While this outage did not affect all Yahoo! members, those who were not able to gain access to their emails accounted for more than one million people.

However, when compared to the total number of 250 million Yahoo! users over the world, this number represents less than 0.5 percent.

The main reason people were so fast to complain was that they had not been warned of the outage, nor was any Yahoo! spokesman keeping them updated on the status of the problem.

The company later issued a statement acknowledging the issue and that they were working to solve it.

Another announcement came when the service was restored: ”We have isolated the root causes of the problem and have restored service. No email data was lost or at risk.”

However, to this date, no official explanation has been given as the causes of the outage or the measures taken to prevent it from happening again.

On the other hand, Yahoo! did display an explanatory message whenever the login error occurred: “We are in the process of upgrading all of our Yahoo! Mail servers as part of our ongoing efforts to give you the best Mail service possible. There is no need to complete this form because we already know that you've received this error. It is temporary and should clear up within a couple of hours.”

In the end, it might simply be a case of server upgrade in preparation for the much-anticipated Beta of Yahoo! Mail.

But one can only wonder: couldn't this have been performed after warning users of the temporary outage or maybe postponing it for the weekend?

All in all, we can only hope the revamped Yahoo! Mail will be worth all this trouble and will be able to help the Sunnyvale-based company regain its glory and reputation.