More Cloud Misery As Yahoo Mail And Flickr Go Dark

Another large cloud-service provider, Yahoo, has been hit by a service delivery problem.

Two of its most popular services, Yahoo Mail and the Flickr photo service were down for several hours on April 28. The problem hit around a million users at its height, the company said, but did not offer any explanation.

Dark Clouds’ Gathering

Yahoo joins Amazon Web Services and Sony Playstation Network as major global service providers who have been hit hard by outages in the last seven days. The company did not give details about  the problems that hit its services but they disappeared around 7:30am Pacific time on April 28, (23:30pm BST April 27). Yahoo Mail has been up and running since 1996.

Yahoo posted this notice on Twitter at about 9am Pacific time April 28 (01:00 BST): “For some users @Flickr is currently slow/inaccessible. We’re fixing the issue to restore functionality ASAP – apologies for any inconvenience.”

A few minutes later, the company posted this note: “This AM @Flickr was inaccessible/slow for some users. We worked quickly to fix & Flickr is now fully functional. Thanks for your patience!”

Yahoo posted this notice on Twitter a couple of hours later: “Yahoo Mail is currently inaccessible to some users. We are working to correct the issue and restore all functionality immediately.”

Yahoo posted the all-clear notice and an apology about its email service outage at 3:49pm Pacific time (09:49 BST). By that time, Yahoo Mail had been down for more than six hours for some users.

Even though Yahoo’s services have been eclipsed in many areas by competitors Google and Microsoft, Yahoo Mail still ranks among the world’s largest cloud-based email services. In October 2010, Yahoo reported that its email service had 273 million users.