Yahoo’s services went down for more than seven hours on Thursday, drawing ire from thousands of its email users.
Downdetector, a website that provides information on online outages, had received more than5,000 reports of problems related to Yahoo Mail by 2.a.m ET. Hundreds of users also reported problems with other Yahoo services, according to Downdetector.
The problem was resolved later in the day, but the company gave few details about the outage.
“Most services are back online. This is a technical issue that affected our services,” Yahoo tweeted from its official customer care account at 9.30 a.m.
Most of the complaints originated in Europe, with a heavy concentration in the United Kingdom, but one Twitter user complained that Yahoo had also been down for hours in Australia. Several users complained on Twitter that emails they were sent during the outage were “missing” or lost.
Yahoo’s customer service webpage — help.yahoo.com — also went down for a time, displaying the message, “Thank you for your patience. Our engineers are working quickly to resolve the issue.”
In 2013, a data breach at Yahoo compromised the accounts of the 3 billion users it had at the time. Yahoo parent company Oath, a subsidiary of Verizon, did not provide detail on the cause of Thursday’s outage, saying only that it was “aware of a technical issue” impacting its services.
