14 DAY TRIAL // Yelp, a popular website hosting consumers' reviews about businesses in Bay Area, has become unavailable to several users, although there was no official statement or notification concerning the outage. According to "PC World", the website was blocked today, from around 9 a.m to 11 a.m. Pacific time, but nobody knows for sure what was the reason for the downtime. The source mentioned above reported that some companies restricted the access to the website, because the employees spent too much time browsing the content.
However, it seems that the problem came from an update rolled out by the Yelp developers on Tuesday night. "Yelp wouldn't explain exactly what went wrong, except to say that it was a glitch caused by an update to the Web site that was pushed out Tuesday night. Most Yelp users had no problem visiting the site Wednesday," "PC World" wrote in the article.
All the affected users, who made an attempt to visit the restricted website, got a 403 error saying that they were not allowed to connect to the server. Obviously, the users didn't know what was happening with the service and started posting messages on the Yelp forum in order to get more information.
"It seems like a lot of filters at work added yelp to their list of blocked sites now. I've heard of a handful of daily day time posters in the West Coast, as well as in the East Coast, that have been blocked. Is this the end of day time Yelp?" one user wrote. "I'm over at Boston University. We have no blocking of websites at all here as far as I can tell, and yet I'm blocked on Yelp today here. A few other yelp pals around Boston are suddenly blocked at their work too. Weird. Did Yelp do something wrong to the Internet?" another added.