For an unspecified time, Yahoo's home page simply displayed a plain text message saying Server Hangup.
Yahoo, one of the three busiest Websites in the world, was down for
approximately 40 minutes on Oct. 14, from about 5:30
p.m. to 6:10 p.m. ET.
Yahoo spokesperson Kryssa Guntrum gave eWEEK no specific reason for the outage.
For an unspecified time, Yahoo's home page simply displayed a plain text
"Server Hangup" message in the browser. Other Yahoo features, such as
Yahoo Mail, Calendar, Sports, News and Finance, appeared to not be affected by
the outage.
A number of people on sites such as
Mashable
and
SearchEngineLand
commented on the outage.
A Yahoo staffer Tweeted, a bit wryly:
"As some of you noticed, Yahoo.com was down for a bit this afternoon.
We're back up and running-sorry for the interruption!"
Yahoo was quick to respond-albeit by prepared statement-to the query from
eWEEK.
"For a brief period this afternoon, Yahoo.com was inaccessible to some
users. We have identified the issue and are working to correct it immediately.
We know that this may have caused some inconvenience and we apologize to our
users who might have been affected," Guntrum said via e-mail.
When the site came back up, some users reported to eWEEK that for a span of
time the local news they were accustomed to seeing on the Yahoo home page was
news from another city, and that the usual rotation of 32 top news stories was
whittled down to four.
Only a few weeks ago, Yahoo brought a new data processing center online,
located near Niagara Falls, N.Y.
Yahoo wouldn't say whether the outage had anything to do with the new data
center.
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Chris Preimesberger was named Editor-in-Chief of Features & Analysis at eWEEK in November 2011. Previously he served eWEEK as Senior Writer, covering a range of IT sectors that include data center systems, cloud computing, storage, virtualization, green IT, e-discovery and IT governance. His blog, Storage Station, is considered a go-to information source. Chris won a national Folio Award for magazine writing in November 2011 for a cover story on Salesforce.com and CEO-founder Marc Benioff, and he has served as a judge for the SIIA Codie Awards since 2005. In previous IT journalism, Chris was a founding editor of both IT Manager's Journal and DevX.com and was managing editor of Software Development magazine. His diverse resume also includes: sportswriter for the Los Angeles Daily News, covering NCAA and NBA basketball, television critic for the Palo Alto Times Tribune, and Sports Information Director at Stanford University. He has served as a correspondent for The Associated Press, covering Stanford and NCAA tournament basketball, since 1983. He has covered a number of major events, including the 1984 Democratic National Convention, a Presidential press conference at the White House in 1993, the Emmy Awards (three times), two Rose Bowls, the Fiesta Bowl, several NCAA men's and women's basketball tournaments, a Formula One Grand Prix auto race, a heavyweight boxing championship bout (Ali vs. Spinks, 1978), and the 1985 Super Bowl. A 1975 graduate of Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif., Chris has won more than a dozen regional and national awards for his work. He and his wife, Rebecca, have four children and reside in Redwood City, Calif.Follow on Twitter: editingwhiz
