Now Yahoo Mail is having problems

Well, when it rains it pours. After a day of writing about Windows Live mail problems, I was alerted by a colleague that Yahoo mail was out for them.

I tabbed over to my Yahoo Mail window and noticed that my window, which had been working all day, was now returning an error message.

When I tried to reload the page, I got the following message:

(Credit: CNET News.com)

"Can't talk now. System's down," read the headline. "Sorry for the holdup. Looks like a temporary glitch in our network has part of Yahoo! mail down, so you're briefly without service. Rest assured the alarms are blaring in the basement and our team is working frantically to get you up and running ASAP. Again, the snag is on our end -- so there's no need for you to do a thing."

Well, I guess I've had enough e-mail for one day anyway. I'm headed to bed. Hopefully everyone's servers will be working tomorrow.

Update: As I was publishing this blog, my mail service was restored.

[vahounddc]

I am near despair about the unreliability of Yahoo! Mail. I switched to Yahoo two years ago. All my business, personal and community activities stuff goes through that account. But it now goes down at least once a day. I can almost count on it not being accessible during the late afternoon on business days (east coast time).

It is such a pain to change email addresses. It has taken me two years and many of my contacts are still not fully switched to the Yahoo address. To switch again will cause massive disruption.

I have no idea why such an allegedly major company is incapable of providing reliable service. I wish I knew which provider had a better track record. Gmail? An AIM account through (shudder) AOL? This is very disappointing, especially since I have a paid Yahoo Plus account. I'd pay a little more for reliability.

[miconn69]

I am still having problems loading Yahoo Mail, or really anything having to do with yahoo. When I first open up my internet explorer, yahoo's old homepage loads up, but if I click on mail or My Yahoo, I get errors. Changed to gmail, don't have any probems there...any ideas? I still have like a gazillion Yahoo Mail messages, I just cant open my dang mailbox.........Been like this for quite a few months....

[hirtabill]

My probs with yahoo as a whole, it has been getting worse and for the past 2 days, including today, I have been unable to get past the loading of the home page. I need my mail. Is there anyway we can find out from yahoo direct?

[monirmamoun]

Is it just you, Ina? Thanks for asking.

No, it's definitely not Yahoo, and definitely just you.

You are just impatient.

The last time I checked, most web mail systems take two or three minutes to take you from the login to the actual mail.

Also, most web mail systems take a couple minutes to load each email after you click on it.

And Yahoo deals with a lot of mail. The fact that after two minutes waiting for each mail to pop up, the time-out failure rate is only 50%, and that is pretty good. It is at least twice as good as 100%, and if it were mathematically possible to divide by zero it would be infinitely better. And they display a helpful message after that two minute period -- keep in mind they keep you busy along that time by displaying your wait time down to a fraction of a second, for increased accuracy and precision -- wait, I forgot what I was talking about.

Anyway, Yahoo, excuse me, Yahoo! Mail is, for all practical purposes, perfect indeed, and if you have a problem with it, then -- don't take offense-- but the imperfection may lie in you. And that is my analysis.

Monir Mamoun

[yahoodown]

Yahoo is in meltdown!
What is it, Monir?
Do you have shares in Yahoo maybe?
My yahoo mail has not worked properly (if at all) for a couple of weeks now!
So lay off Ina and get real.

[jerga1]

lol Mo ur toooooo funny, oh man i remember yahoo mail was a complete disaster, i had to wait like 5 min for each mail to come up

[hirtabill]

I am having great probs with yahoo mail I managed to get into the system only 3 minutes ago after 26hrs and it dropped out after 2 mins, what is going on? Is there any way to contact yahoo other than through their online system?

[showmethedough]

Dear Ina-

Looking for a way to make this news, because it is. Someone is hacking into yahoo accounts and causing them to be shut down. Looks like phishing, but I'm not well-versed enough to know. What I do know: Yahoo shut my account down, with no investigation, and no amount of pleading or ranting on my part will induce them to look into it. Rather than helping, they treated me like a criminal, had me jump through all kinds of hoops to verify my identity, then refused to give me any information.

I thought it was an isolated occurence, but when I logged in to my Flickr account, posts started cropping up about yahoo accounts being closed and accompanying Flickr accounts having gone, "poof!" Turns out this could be happening to hundreds of people. My Flickr account was safe: by some sort of miracle, I was signed in for two weeks. But I have lost all my business contacts, it appears, for good. Since I'm an artist, doing mostly portraiture (all g rated), this is a very bad thing.

I have not seen any news of this on yahoo, so it appears they are keeping mum. What they should be doing is helping their own clients save their accounts; as far as I know, this is still happening to people.

[Ihateyahootoo]

I'm having the same problem for the past 2 days. I chatted with yahoo for the third time last night and was relentless...2 hours. They finally admitted that this is a glitch in their software that their engineers are working on, but they would not give any indication about when this will be resolved. I sent an e-mail to the head of yahoo's north american operations since I was getting the same run around and clearly not a customer focused response to the problem. Let's see if she actually responds. I'm the only idiot my home that is not using gmail!

[mike_6233]

I too am having problems not just with my yahoo! mail account but with yahoo! in general. I have heard that yahoo is having some problems and am patiently waiting for the solution to be found. Until then, I have switched my new contacts to my comcast mail account, which until 2 days ago, was non existent.
Thanks for the heads up that I am not alone.

[josephctu]

I have problems with yahoo messenger. the problems happens when I am chatting with my friends. it disconnected, but the nicks are still on. it bothers me a lot because I use YM to contact with my customers a lot.

[eulij]

Thank goodness there are others with problems! I was beginning to think it was just me. About two months ago my contact list disappeared from my Yahoo account, followed very quickly by the fact that I couldn't get access to my mail. I have since changed e-mail accounts but am still getting no joy from Yahoo over gaining access to over 100 spam and 40 genuine e mails all locked away.

[philnooney]

I am having a variety of problems with the Yahoo site. I have experienced them on XP and Vista machines and have taken all the usual precautions: scan for viruses and spyware, refresh restart (endlessly). The service comes and goes it is most frustrating. I have been trying to find out how to raise this with Yahoo but they do not make the mechanism obvious (bad sign when an organisation has to hide its customer communications channels).

[eulij]

After three weeks of not being able to open e-mails I managed to get into them with no trouble for two days. Today I log on and what do I find? Yes I can't get in again! What an organisation! I also find it a bad sign that communication with Yahoo is absolutely non existent.

[pomondn]

Is there any way for somebody to get to any personnal at Yahoo to inform them of inaccessability of the mal system? I haven't been able to access for about 3 weeks now. When I click on my mail for access, it goes to a page and all I see is, 'Loading...' That's it, loading followed by the 3 little trailing periods. I like others have stuff in our email such as transactions such as PayPal, confirmations, etc. I have a few sites that use my Yahoo account. Does anyone know what is going on?
Thanks..

[lmlayman]

Adding my comment to the mix... Am not receiving all emails sent to me since at least the last week of September. One sender stated he received a "not deliverable at this time" type message nearly 4 hours after sending. Another sent me the error message which was generated 7 hours after the email was send, stated could not establish SMTP connection, and included my email address as "[e-mail]" even though she was simply using the "Reply" feature to an email I sent. Others say they received no bounce back error message at all. One client tried diligently to get information to me using both his corporate account and his personal account from both his workplace and home with no immediate success, however, everything showed up at the same time in my Yahoo inbox three days later. Have no idea how long this has been happening or if it is continuing. Chatted online with Yahoo representative who couldn't solve problem. He directed me to fill out a form and send it to the Yahoo Postmaster. That was a week ago...no response. Tried calling the help number displayed on Yahoo website for assistance. Just a recorded voice service that eventually directed me back to the website for help and hung up. There does not seem to be any way to contact a real person for assistance. I've initiated an account at Gmail and transferred my contact list from Yahoo, but no automated way to transfer archived messages, sent mail, etc. To inform all (except for my contact list) of my address change would be an impossible task since I've had the account for over ten years, so am forced to continue my Yahoo account as a pass through. This is the worst customer support I've ever experienced from a web-based organization. Their investment in customer service appears miminal. Maybe they rationalize this because the service is primarily free. However, I happen to be a paying customer via the Yahoo Mail Plus service and see nothing I get for the $20 a year that isn't offered by Gmail for free except, of course, for a huge dose of frustration.

[dkashefska]

Yahoo is only having problems w/ certain setups. I cannot access my email or my wifes and sometime the yahoo homepage doesn't even load (this is when I try to connect using my wireless network) YET, evereything else on the web works (google, cnet, etc,etc,etc! ) If I connect to my neighbors wireless connection I can load Yahoo homepage, get my mail, everything! ODD HUH? Have compared EVERY setting on my 3 computers on this network and My isp says they cannot help me as I am set-up right! KEEP in mid if you reply, EVERYTHING BUT YAHOO LOADS AND RUNS FINE!!! DK

[worldofhiglet]

Since yesterday afternoon I can no longer access ANY Yahoo pages: not news, email, maps or even MyBlogLog. I have tried my Mac and my PCs on Firefox, IE and Safari and no joy at all, all links to Yahoo return a 'server not responding' message. Is that it? Is Yahoo now dead?

[spirit_child]

My yahoo was working fine at work today - until I got home around 4:45 pm. I tried to log into my email account and couldn't! I cannot access any yahoo pages at all either - what a pain in the butt! It's been 5 hrs and I don't get an error message from them about the problem. I've tried two different browsers - and nothing.

My friend in England can get into his account - no problem. (I'm in Canada)

What's up with that!?!?

[Myndara]

Same here, and has been this way for several days. Sometimes I can get in; sometimes I cannot access ANYTHING related to Yahoo, including YIM. Everything else, all other programs and sites are working fine; have tried two different computers, tried resetting my net connection, tried dropping my firewall, and tried on a completely different network and computer. It is intermittent and mostly down. Yesterday I did manage to get on using someone else's Macbook and a free wifi connection, but nothing so far today. You can't even get to help on Yahoo to ask them what to do.

I can only hope I can at least get in long enough to send a global email to everyone to send them to my gmail account--it looks like Yahoo is shot--if I can't trust it, I can't use it, which is a shame, because I have had that email address for almost 10 years and used it for everything.

Any advice? Sounds like there is a lot of this going around and no help from Yahoo.

[cassilady]

I have been having problems with Yahoo for the past few days too. I can get their home page but not mail and I can't even access their help site. I get a message Server not found or Server not responding. This really sucks because I had alot of contact and other information that I rely on in my yahoo account. I finally sent everything to my gmail account. There is a way that you can import all of your contacts from yahoo to your gmail account which is pretty simple. I spent the whole day today contacting all of my creditors, banks, etc. and changing my email account with them. What a pain!
Good luck everybody!

[wimiclp]

Hello Jamie,

Thank you for writing to Yahoo! Mail.

We understand your concerns. However, under Yahoo!'s Terms of Service
and its Privacy Policy, we are unable to disclose the details regarding
a user's account. We are not able to make exceptions to this rule.

We appreciate your patience.

Thank you again for contacting Yahoo! Mail. Your case number for this
issue is 57137476. Please reference it in all future communication about
this particular issue.

Regards,

John

Yahoo! Customer Care

57137476

For assistance with all Yahoo! services please visit:

http://help.yahoo.com/

[wimiclp]

Can this make any sense?
I believe the account was taken over, but they will not tell me what happened.
How does that help the consumer?

[neighborhoodwatchbear]

Is anyone else having problems with red x's showing up in yahoo mail when thumbnail pics should appear? I've had this problem for more than 2 months now. I've tried nearly everything you can think of. I suspect it's a Yahoo Mail problem because thumbnails open in other situations.

[Crcliffe]

I have not been able to get into my Yahoo account for almost 2 weeks now!!! And the help is basically no help at all!!!