Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said Friday saying she was “very sorry” for the week’s Yahoo Mail outage, which she implied has affected roughly one million users.
Reports surfaced late Monday that Yahoo was having some major issues with Yahoo Mail, one of the company’s most important services with about 100 million daily users.
Yahoo confirmed the outage at the time but details were sketchy about what caused it or how many people were affected. Mayer’s post Friday sheds a little bit more light on the fiasco.
“This has been a very frustrating week for our users and we are very sorry,” she said in a post on Tumblr, adding, “we really let you down this week.”
“Unfortunately, the outage was much more complex than it seemed at first, which is why it’s taking us several days to resolve the compounding issues.”
Yahoo’s Mail engineering team was alerted Monday night to a hardware outage in one of the company’s storage systems serving 1 percent of Yahoo’s 100 million users, she said.
The Mail team immediately started working with storage engineers to restore access and move to back-up systems, expecting a full recovery by Tuesday afternoon.
“However, the problem was a particularly rare one, and the resolution for the affected accounts was nuanced since different users were impacted in different ways,” she said.
For instance, some people saw an outdated “scheduled maintenance” page while trying to log in to their accounts, which was an incorrect message.
Since Mayer’s post, Mail had been restored to almost everyone, she said, and the backlog of messages had been delivered. The company will continue to roll out IMAP access and restore people’s inboxes, including returning messages in folders and starring messages.
“We’re going to be working hard on improvements to prevent issues like this in the future,” she said.
Improving Yahoo Mail has been a major focus in attracting new users to the company.
But a high number of users were upset even before this week’s problems. Yahoo Mail was given a redesign in October that provided it with a more Gmail-like interface. But it was poorly received by many, for both the design and for functions that were removed.
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