Yahoo! glitch trips up e-mail
Published: 05 Mar 2002 11:06 GMT
Members of Yahoo's free e-mail list service are without a clubhouse.
Yahoo! Groups, a collection of discussion lists based on various interests, has been inaccessible from the online portal's Web site since Monday morning, Yahoo! spokeswoman Mary Osako confirmed. The outage, noted in a message on the Yahoo! Groups home page, has prevented millions of members from receiving e-mail from their cohorts.
Osako would not discuss details of the problem, but she said it is hardware-related.
"We're working aggressively to fix the problem and to institute new processes to protect against similar incidents in the future," said Osaka, adding an apology to Yahoo Groups users.
An outage on the group e-mail service affects a broad audience. Yahoo Groups drew about 9.5 million unique visitors in January, according to Net measurement company Jupiter Media Metrix.
The service's existence is the result of Yahoo!'s acquisition of eGroups in summer 2000, when it paid roughly $432m in stock for the list-hosting company. At the time, the service had roughly 17 million members and 800,000 e-mail lists.
Yahoo! is in the process of merging its Yahoo! Groups and Yahoo! Clubs, a similar but Web-based community that uses online posting and instant chat to communicate.
Yahoo! said it started integrating the services two weeks ago and plans to have the project finished by the end of March. Osako said the outage is unrelated to the combination of the services.
But with impending changes, some Yahoo! Groups users say the service has become increasingly unreliable and inundated with advertisements.
"Some of the groups require quick transfer of information or it would become worthless," Craig Ochs, who lives in Brookfield, Wisconsin, said in an e-mail. Ochs is the moderator of an aviation-related group that trades information about security breaches and business news in real time. "Yahoo! has been less than reliable, and rumors abound about them starting to charge for the service. Ahhhh, Yahoo!"
Osako said the company does not have plans to start charging for its groups service.
For everything Internet-related, from the latest legal and policy-related news, to domain name updates, see ZDNet UK's Internet News Section.
Have your say instantly, and see what others have said. Go to the Telecoms forum.
Let the editors know what you think in the Mailroom.
Did you find this article useful?
30 out of 71 people found this useful
Digg
Slashdot
Del.ici.ous
Stumble
Reddit
