14 DAY TRIAL // Yesterday, it was one of those days when everything went bad for the famous instant messaging client Yahoo Messenger because numerous users encountered problems when they tried to connect to the network. Because I was one of these users, I'll explain exactly what happened. At the first attempt, Yahoo refused to connect at all and showed nothing more than "Signing in". OK, I said, I clicked on Cancel and entered my account details one more time. Then, something strange happened. The instant messaging client opened my web-browser and redirected me to a Yahoo page to enter my username and password.
Because I was afraid of a phishing attempt (don't insult me, I'm quite paranoiac), I double-checked the URL link and the content of the website. It was really Yahoo's page so I entered my account details. It was the official page of Yahoo Web Messenger, a recently-released version of the instant messaging client that allows you to chat straight from an online interface. Probably Yahoo Messenger encountered errors so the Sunnyvale company encouraged us to connect to the web version of the application. I refused to do so and, every time I clicked on Sign In, a new browser window was opened.
After approximately 5 minutes, Yahoo Messenger returned a different message: your account information is wrong, please try again. 'What the heck?'- I said - 'these are the same details I used before so there's nothing wrong'. The same error for about 10 minutes.
It's been a while since Yahoo Messenger refused to connect. I'm a little bit calmer now so I decided to try once more. Finally, Yahoo Messenger connects to the network and seems to work just fine. After only 5 minutes, it is automatically disconnected without any reason and all of the events mentioned above are back. To remain as cool as before, I switched to Windows Live Messenger. I asked some of my friends with different ISPs and Yahoo Messenger had the same behavior on their computers, too.
Now, what should we do? Well, we have two options: wait until the Sunnyvale company resolves the issues or do just like me and switch to the Microsoft alternative, Windows Live Messenger.