Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has posted an apology for the problems affecting the company’s email service this week. Some users were unable to access their emails for several days, and Mayer has said “we are very sorry” as well as outlining some of the issues that led to the downtime.
“The outage was much more complex than it seemed at first,” writes Mayer. “Our network operating center alerted the Mail engineering team to a specific hardware outage in one of our storage systems serving 1% of our users. The Mail team immediately started working with the storage engineers to restore access and move to our back-up systems.”
However, the complexity of the problem meant that a full recovery took much longer than expected. “Over the remainder of the week, we worked around the clock to restore access and all messages to inboxes,” continues Mayer. “This has included restoring IMAP access for people using other email programs like Outlook or Apple Mail.”
It wasn’t a great week for Yahoo, with Flickr also suffering problems with downtime, although both services are now running smoothly again. According to ComScore, Yahoo Mail has around 289 million users across the world, which is second only to Gmail at 304 million.
Mayer concludes: “We’re going to be working hard on improvements to prevent issues like this in the future. While our overall uptime is well above 99.9 percent, even accounting for this incident, we really let you down this week. We can, and we will, do better in the future.”
