Web Outages for Yahoo!
Web Design & Technology News, June 21, 2006

June 21, 2006

Outages across the Web left some registered Yahoo users without e-mail or instant-messaging capability on Tuesday and Wednesday.
By Elinor Mills

While the company acknowledged an early morning outage Wednesday, some Yahoo user reports indicated that services were also out on Tuesday night in some areas. There were also complaints of Yahoo Sports Fantasy Baseball being unavailable.

"I've been encountering problems with logging in to Yahoo last night and again this morning. Sluggish to get into mail, and I have been unable to log in to Messenger at all this morning," said Joe Beaulaurier, the blogger for "The Unofficial Yahoo Weblog," which is part of the Weblogs, Inc. Network. The site also received comments from users complaining that Yahoo did not immediately post a notice about the outage on its main page.

While Yahoo's e-mail and messenger services were inaccessible for some people, Yahoo Search, Yahoo News and the Yahoo home pages seem to have been unaffected.

"For a brief period early this morning, certain areas of Yahoo were inaccessible to a portion of registered users due to software-related issues," Yahoo spokeswoman Kiersten Hollars said in a statement. "We have identified the issue and corrected it. We know that this may have caused some inconvenience, and we apologize to our users who might have been affected. We take these issues extremely seriously, and Yahoo is instituting new processes to protect against similar incidents from occurring again."

Yahoo did not release any details on the percentage of users affected, or what specifically caused the "software-related issues."

On Monday, Yahoo announced a beta release of its new instant-messaging application with voice. Coincidentally, the beta version was released the same day Microsoft officially launched its own new service, Windows Live Messenger.

Yahoo Messenger with Voice offers several plug-ins in addition to new communications features. In order for outside users to contribute to the system, Yahoo has opened its application programming interface for people wishing to develop additional plug-ins.