E-mail has become so common and necessary in the modern age that it is seen as a basic utility, like phone service or electricity, for most of us. That’s why it can be so unnerving, not to mention frustrating, to be lockedout of your e-mail account.
With more and more people using net based e-mail services such as Gmail or Yahoo, the likelihood of experiencing a service outage — effectively being locked out of your account — becomes greater and greater. This is exactly what happened Monday, when tens of thousands of Yahoo Mail users (maybe more) found themselves unable to access neither their email accounts nor inboxes.
As of 5 p.m. Eastern Standard Time Monday, users were still reporting being locked out of their Yahoo accounts, and receiving one of several perplexing error codes. Yahoo Mail has an estimated 250 million users worldwide, making it one of the largest free e-mail services on the planet, and a trusted name that many have come to rely on over the years.
When questioned about the service outage, Yahoo spokespeople responded with a boilerplate response, indicating that only “a small fraction” of Yahoo users had experienced trouble with their e-mail accounts during the day. The company insists that it is an isolated incident, and that they are diligently working to correct the issue.
What the Yahoo’s spokespeople fail to mention is that a small fraction of 250 million people can still be more than a million people — a sizable number indeed!
The Yahoo outage and several recent outages by Google’s Gmail service remind us of the volatility of web-based e-mail. While statistics show that more and more people are switching over to web-based services, there is always the possibility of outages or “lockouts” caused by server errors, hackers, or other disruptive forces that can produce downtime in the network.
It’s a bit like realizing that your home phone may not always work, and there may come a day when you pick up the receiver to make a call and don’t get a dial tone…for hours at a time. The only difference of course, is that most web-based e-mail programs are free or advertising sponsored services. Still, even if you’re communicating for free, it’s not much consolation when you can’t send or receive e-mails.
Reports of the Yahoo Mail disruption first began appearing on Twitter this morning. The problem does not appear to be geographically specific, as users in several countries and in various geographic regions have reported being unable to access their Yahoo e-mail.
