Yahoo's Marissa Mayer on Mail outage: 'We really let you down'

(Credit:James Martin/CNET) Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer on Friday evening issued an apology to Yahoo Mail users for the email service's prolonged, multiday outage.

"This has been a very frustrating week for our users and we are very sorry," wrote Mayer, on the company's official Tumblr blog. "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," she continued.

Related postsAfter Yahoo's Mail outage, Flickr crashed tooYahoo Mail slowly comes back, but more work to be done'Hardware problem' causes partial outage for Yahoo MailYahoo gets 31% of search revenue from Microsoft dealShocker! Yahoo whiz kid likes Snapchat She concluded the post: "While our overall uptime is well above 99.9%, even accounting for this incident, we really let you down this week. We can, and we will, do better in the future."

While the email outage itself was bad, the company has also been criticized for the way it handled its damage control. In her blog post, Mayer explained more of the details: The the outage affected 1 percent of the service's users, and that since the problem affected individual accounts in different ways, the resolution took longer than expected, she wrote. She also noted that some users were given a confusing "scheduled maintenance" message when they tried to access their inboxes.

The outage began on Monday night around 10:30 p.m. PT, and email sent to the affected accounts were not delivered. The company also said on its help blog that messages delivered between November 25 and December 9 may not have shown up in inboxes either, though it was not clear if the reason was due to the recent outage.

Mayer said it was a "frustrating week" for Mail users, but it was no doubt a frustrating week for the company itself. Just to pile onto Yahoo's service woes, Flickr also experienced a minor outage on Thursday.

Tags: Marissa Mayer, Yahoo, Yahoo Mail

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Yahoo CEO Mayer Apologizes For Mail Outage That She Says Affected 1% Of Users

After a week of Yahoo Mail outages that began four days ago, CEO Marissa Mayer has posted an apology to the company Tumblr. In it, she gives some details about the issue, which was apparently related to a hardware failure — and says that the issue affected 1% of Mail users.

“For many of us, Yahoo Mail is a lifeline to our friends, family members and customers,” reads Mayer’s apology. “This week, we experienced a major outage that not only interrupted that connection, but caused many of you a massive inconvenience — that’s unacceptable and it’s something we’re taking very seriously. “

The issue began on December 9th late in the evening, when a hardware outage alerted the engineering team to an issue with storage that served 1% of Yahoo’s users. The issue, says Mayer, was a ‘particularly rare’ one. Mayer also notes that a confusing ‘scheduled maintenance’ error which some users had seen during the emergency was in error.

Mayer says that, as of this afternoon, Yahoo has restored access to ‘almost everyone’ and delivered the queue of messages that was held up from being delivered. IMAP access has not been completely restored, nor has the complete inbox states of users with folders and ‘star’ statuses. So if you log in to your inbox and see that stuff still missing, it’s theoretically coming. Yahoo says it will be reaching out to individual users on the status of their inboxes.

“Above all else, 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%, even accounting for this incident, we really let you down this week,” Mayer’s note concludes. “We can, and we will, do better in the future.”

The outage began suddenly and has gone on for an extremely long period of time, especially for a critical service like email. We reported on the issues on Wednesday, noting that the issues were affecting small business owners.

“Yahoo is so overwhelmed they cannot answer phone calls or reply to emails,” one user told TechCrunch. “I’ve been on hold for hours and hours since last Sunday, spoke twice to a real person who in both instances sent me to another number that is absolutely unreachable.”

“They have shut down the websites of countless businesses. The last person I talked with

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